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University  of  California. 

Received  Q)t^-        •  '9"<9  • 

Accasioii  No.  Z  1 1   1  9     ■    Class  No.    %V  2.. 


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THE  RELIGION 

OF  DEMOCRACY 


A  MANUAL  OF  DEVOTION. 


BY 


CHARLES   FERGUSON. 


>A\\\\\\  III/  II 1/  //yf^y  y. 


{J^>iPTEN.NY5eN;N|El.r>^^l 


LH^HHi^v^  T-/»  i-r— 4W.-I1 

VTV///// j/  I  I  l\\\\\\\\VS 


F.  TENNYSON  NEELY, 

PUBLISHER. 
LONDON.  NEW  YORK.  CHICAGO. 


i;c^>.  u^^:j 


Copyrighted,  1899, 

in  the 

United  States 

and 

Great  Britain, 

by 

F.  Tennyson  Neely. 

(All  Rights  Reserved.) 


%  ;/v^ 


FORE  WORD. 


A  SYMBOL. 

On  the  way  across  the  park  that  stretches  its 
parterres  between  the  Capitol  and  tie  new  Con- 
gressional Library,  one  raay  stop  and  rest  on  a 
stone  bench  in  front  of  the  vast,  pillared, 
porticoed,  Graeco-Roman  building  where  Con- 
gress meets.  Close  by  is  the  togaed  statue  of 
Washington,  seated  in  a  kind  of  curule  chair, 
and  pointing,  with  one  finger,  up  to  heaven. 
To  the  right  and  left,  in  flawless  synametry, 
stretch  the  classic  wings  of  the  Capitol,  fit  each 
for  a  Parthenon;  and  over  all, the  pompous 
dome,  Argus-eyed  with  serried  little  glimmer- 
ing windows,  broods  and  settles  mightily  down 
in  obstinate  immensity. 

Seen  thus,  in  the  afternoon  sun,  the  building 
grows  into  one's  mind  as  a  symbol  of  things 
that  have  been,  but  are  passing  away.  The 
suggestions  of  the  scene  are  reminiscent.  This 
is  the  America  of  foreign  and  ancient  tutelage, 
trailing  the  Old  World;  the  nation  that  did  not 
know  the  originality  of  its  vocation,  and  did 
not  venture  to  breathe  deep.  It  is  the  America 
of  the  paper  constitution,  of  orations  on  the 
classic  model,  of  moralizing  art,  and  intolerant 
virtues;  the  land  of  Spartan  seclusion  from  the 
world,  yat  of  huge  comfortableness;  the  land  of 
the  perfect  plan  that  must  not  be  spoiled ;  the 

•  •  • 

ui 


Fore  Word. 

sophomoric  land  that  had  not  yet  loved  and 
suffered. 

Over  against  this  picture  there  is  in  my  mind 
a  vision  of  very  different  suggestion.  There 
are  nights  when,  looking  from  my  window 
across  huddling  chimneys  and  the  flat  roofs  of 
houses,  I  see  the  Capitol  transfigured.  The  co- 
lossal dome,  white  and  magnificent  in  the 
moonlight,  swims  in  a  luminous,  electric  mist 
that  comes  brimming  up  from  the  cit.y.  The 
glorious  ghost  of  the  Capitol,  looming  over  sor- 
did chimney-tops,  seems  like  a  symbol  of  the 
new  age  and  the  America  that  is  in  the  mak- 
ing. Here  is  modernity,  the  age  of  electricity^ — 
and  mystery.  Here  is  the  type  of  the  longing  of 
the  people,  the  awe  of  science,  the  passion  for 
the  eternal,  the  cosmic  fear,  the  victorious  faith, 
the  contradictions  of  life,  the  problems,  the  pov- 
erty, the  tragic  perplexity,  the  cry  in  the  night; 
here  steel-clad  battleships  and  sudden  war,  the 
knight-errantry  of  the  Republic,  the  pathos  of 
Spain  and  Italy  and  Greece  and  China,  im- 
mense expansion  and  contraction,  the  old  ethnic 
hate,  the  effacement  of  boundaries,  world-wide 
equality,  fraternity,  ecumenic  democracy,  una- 
nimity. 

This  shimmering  dome  in  the  moonlight,  mys- 
tic, aerial,  portentous,  seems  a  wraith  of  revo- 
lution— the  prophetic,  insurgent  spirit  of  the 
nation. 

I  perceive  how  deep  down  in  the  infinite  are 
the  springs  of  history.  And  I  am  reassured  of 
the  love  of  God. 

Washington,  1899. 

iv 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER  I.  PAGE 

The  Return  to  the  Concrete 7 

CHAPTER  II. 
The  Man  of  the  Modern  Spirit 24 

CHAPTER  UL 
The  Revolution  Absolute 86 

CHAPTER  IV. 
The  Discovery  of  America 57 

CHAPTER  V. 
The  Discount  of  Glory 70 

CHAPTER  VI. 
The  Sovereignty  of  the  People 91 

CHAPTER  VII. 
The  World  of  News 110 

CHAPTER  VIII. 
The  Caste  of  Goodness 134 

CHAPTER  IX. 
The  Rise  of  a  Democratic  Catholic  Church 145 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


CHAPTER  I. 

THE  RETURN  TO  THE  CONCRETE. 

I. — The  spirit  of  the  age  is  saying  to  its  chil- 
dren: Have  faith.  Make  yourself  at  home.  This 
is  your  own  house.  The  laws  were  made  for 
you,  gravitation  and  the  chemical  afiSnities,  not 
you  for  them.  No  one  can  put  you  out  of  the 
house.     Stand  up;  the  ceiling  is  high. 

This  is  eternity — now — you  are  sunk  as  deep 
in  it,  wrapped  as  close  in  it  as  you  ever  will 
be.  The  future  is  an  illusion ;  it  never  arrives. 
It  flies  before  you  as  you  advance.  Always  it 
is  to-day,  and  after  a  long  while  it  is  still  to- 
day ;  and  after  death  and  a  thousand  years,  it 
is  to-day.  You  have  great  deeds  to  perform, 
and  you  must  do  them  now. 

If  you  should  act  with  simplicity  and  bold- 
ness, do  you  think  that  you  would  have  to  stand 
alone  and  take  the  consequences?    Have  you  no 

7 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

idea  that  God  would  back  you  up?  That  is  as 
if  you  thought  this  world  were  mainly  bones, 
and  the  soul  a  pale  prisoner,  looking  wistfully 
through  the  ribs  of  it.  It  is  as  if  God  were 
caught  iu  His  own  body,  and  could  not  move 
otherwise  than  according  to  the  laws  laid  down 
in  the  books,  and  as  if  all  the  people  that  pass 
in  the  streets  had  wan,  scared  souls  caught  in 
their  bodies  like  animals  in  a  trap.  For  if  God 
may  not  do  as  He  likes,  how  can  a  man  be  other 
than  a  prisoner? 

God  is  free.  Go  out  doors  and  see  for  your- 
self. Are  not  the  trees  wayward  and  whimsi- 
cal? Is  not  the  wind  let  loose,  and  is  not  the 
sea  savage  enough?  Do  not  the  birds  wheel 
and  turn  as  they  like?  So  does  God  do  as  He 
likes.  He  is  not  caught  in  His  body;  neither 
are  you.  You  can  move  if  you  try;  have  faith. 
Have  faith  in  God.    • 

I  come  to  you  with  great  ideas,  ideas  big 
with  revolution — but  they  are  common.  You 
will  recognize  them  as  your  own.  Only  it  is 
necessary  to  put  words  to  them.  Words  are 
the  wings  of  ideas ;  without  words  they  brood, 
but  cannot  fly.  And  these  ideas  of  ours  must 
fly  from  land  to  land  and  kindle  the  whole 
earth. 

Civilization  grows  senile;  but  the  soul  is  al- 

8 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

ways  young.    Witness  stoutly  for  the  soul,  and 
you  shall  renew  the  youth  of  the  world. 

II. — Are  you  grieved  to  see  a  crowd  of  peo- 
ple met  together  to  worship  God,  but  not  frankly 
believing  in  God,  and  not  daring  to  risk  their 
lives  upon  the  moral  law?  Do  you  dislike  to 
see  a  crowd  of  bankers  and  business  men  met 
together  to  worship  Money,  but  not  frankly  be- 
lieving in  the  power  of  money  or  daring  to  trust 
their  souls  to  it?  Does  it  pain  you  to  hear  them 
talk  of  good  faith  and  honor  and  the  morals  of 
the  country?  Do  you  long  to  see  men  simple  of 
heart  and  honest,  believing  flatly  in  the  soul, 
or  in  the  five  senses,  without  dodging  or  subter- 
fuge? Come,  then,  it  shall  be  so.  Stop  here 
and  resolve  that  you  will  not  compromise  any 

more. 

It  is  not  so  bad  to  be  a  materialist.  If  you 
keep  to  the  facts  you  will  not  get  away  from 
God.  The  moral  laws  are  not  separate  from 
matter.  They  are  wrought  into  the  fiber  of  the 
material  world.  You  cannot  dig  anywhere 
without  striking  them. 

III.— The  desire  and  passion  of  God  is  to  be- 
get souls  of  men  through  the  long-birth  proc- 
esses and  the  eons  of  nature;  souls  that  shall 

9 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

be  separate  from  His  own  soul,  and  that  shall 
stand  over  against  Him,  so  that  He  can  look 
upon  them,  and  have  communion  v^ith  them 
and  be  not  Alone.  And  in  order  that  the  souls 
of  men  shall  become  thus  separate  and  distinct 
from  the  soul  of  God,  it  is  necessary  that  God 
should  hide  Himself,  and  that  men  should 
learn  to  trust  their  own  thoughts  and  their  own 
eyes.  In  this  withdrawal  of  God  is  the  peril 
and  crisis  of  creation,  the  inevitable  opportu- 
nity of  sin,  the  tragedy  and  pathos  of  our  life 
upon  this  earth. 

Do  you  not  understand  the  taciturnity  of 
God?  Do  you  not  see  why  it  is  that  He  does  not 
blazon  His  name  in  the  sky,  or  accost  you  with 
words — why  He  bosoms  you  in  His  arms,  and 
turns  His  face  away,  and  waits,  and  is  patient 
and  silent?  Have  you  had  dreams  of  Nirvana 
and  sickly  visions  and  raptures?  Have  you 
imagined  that  the  end  of  your  life  is  to  be 
absorbed  back  into  the  life  of  God,  and  to  flee 
the  earth  and  forget  all?  Or  do  you  want  to 
walk  on  air  or  fly  on  wings,  or  build  a  heav- 
enly city  in  the  clouds?  Come,  let  us  take  our 
kit  on  our  shoulders,  and  go  out  and  build  the 
city  here. 

IV. — You  need  not  doubt  that  the  embryo  of 

10 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

the  soul  of  man  is  to  be  found  in  the  plants  and 

animals. 

Environment  is  the  body  of  God,  and  the  ger- 
minal soul  of  man  is  lapped  in  God  like  a  child 
in  the  womb.  The  desire  and  longing  of  God 
is  to  get  the  soul  born ;  and  there  is  a  labor  of 
eons  in  the  parturition. 

God  could  not  make  a  free  soul  out  of  hand. 
He  could  not  make  it  at  all.  The  soul  must 
claim  its  own  liberty  and  life. 

And  so  one  must  say  that  the  free  spirit  of 
man  is  uncreated,  is  not  made  by  God,  but  be- 
gotten of  Him.  Words  fail,  for  you  touch  here 
the  hem  of  the  robe  of  the  eternal  mystery. 
But  it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at  that  God  should 
suffer  so  long  to  integrate  a  soul  out  of  His  own 
goul— a  soul  that  should  look  Him  in  the  face 
and  be  faithful  to  Him. 

v.— Environment  is  not  everything:  life  has 
had  a  will  of  its  own  from  the  beginning.  The 
living  thing  is  pressed  up  close  against  the  life 
of  God.  God  is  free  and  omnific,  except  that 
He  cannot  compel  what  is  his  heart's  desire- 
that  the  creature  shall  act  from  within  itself. 
He  cannot  require  that  it  shall  have  faith. 

The  living  thing  is  free,  but  weak  and  faint 
of  heart;  and  with  great  difficulty  it  learns  to 

11 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

believe  and  strive.  Mystery  of  the  love  of  God, 
and  the  infinite  patience  and  tenderness !  Like 
a  baby's  fingers  feeling  vaguely  over  the 
breasts  of  a  woman,  and  like  the  thrill  and  re- 
sponse and  the  tightening  clasp,  so  does  God  an- 
swer back  every  vague  and  timid  adventure  of 
faith !     And  this  they  call  Natural  Selection. 

How  perverse  and  pathetic  the  desires  of  the 
animals.  But  they  all  get  what  they  ask  for 
— long  necks  and  trunks,  flapping  ears  and 
branching  horns  and  corrugated  hides — any- 
thing, if  only  they  will  believe  in  life  and  try. 

What  imaginable  caricature  has  not  God 
submitted  to  in  order  that  a  man  might  be  born 
in  His  image — and  a  beautiful  woman ! 

"V"!. — Civilizations  are  destroyed  by  great 
ideas,  apprehended,  but  not  lived  up  to. 

Philosophy,  poetry,  science,  art  and  the 
mysteries  of  religion  are  forever  beckoning  men 
on  to  a  more  intimate  contact  with  God  and 
with  the  interior  and  elemental  world.  If  men 
would  think,  and  dig,  and  pray,  and  paint  and 
carve  with  a  perfect  daring,  all  would  be  well 
and  they  would  have  built  the  Holy  City  long 
ago.  But  they  have  not  faith  enough :  they 
recoil  from  the  shock  and  risk,  touch  the  deeper 
mysteries  and  shrink  back.     They  become  sen- 

12 


The  Relig-ion  of  Democracy, 

timental  about  God  and  separate  the  sacred 
from  the  secular.  They  refuse  the  desire  of 
the  heart  and  breed  in  their  bodies  a  swarm  of 
petty  appetites,  divisive  and  corrupting.  The 
force  of  the  divine  and  elemental  passion  in 
them  goes  to  the  refinement  of  prurient  arts. 
And  the  corruption  of  the  best  is  the  worst  cor- 
ruption. 

The  death  of  nations  is  in  the  rejection  of 
their  own  most  wistful  desire.  The  Truth  ap- 
pears, is  seen,  touched,  handled,  and  debated, 
is  accepted  notionally,  but  rejected  in  fact,  and 
crucified. 

Europe  and  America  to-day  are  sick  with  the 
nightmare  of  their  dreams.  They  have  dreamed 
of  Democracy,  and  in  their  dreams  have 
achieved  liberty — but  only  in  their  dreams,  not 
otherwise. 

The  madhouses  are  full  of  people  that  breathe 
in  the  real  world,  but  live  in  their  ideals.  And 
the  nations  are  mad  with  this  madness,  and  are 
ready  to  kill  the  Lord  of  Life. 

With  God  the  thought  and  the  act  are  one.  The 
worlds  are  sustained  in  their  courses,  the  storm 
rages,  the  birds  sing,  and  your  heart  is  beating 
because  God  is  thinking. 

But  we  see  that  the  world  is  full  of  sentimental- 
ists.    The  courts,  the  academies  and  the  cham- 

13 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

bers  of  commerce  are  mostly  ruled  by  absent- 
minded  people  who  say  and  do  not,  and  know 
not  what  they  do. 

The  Devil's  right  name  is  abstraction.  To  lie 
and  to  know  it  is  to  evince  that  one  is  not  alto- 
gether a  liar ;  but  to  lie  and  not  to  know  it  is  to 
be  false  indeed.  This  is  Sin,  and  the  end  of  it 
is  death.  But  death  is  better  than  sin.  It  must 
be  better  than  sin,  because  it  is  nearer  the  truth. 

YII. — These  wretched  fellows  that  scramble 
so  breathlessly  for  a  competency,  and  cannot 
bold  up  their  heads  if  their  coats  are  rough — 
Les  miserables!    Have  pity. 

And  these  others  that  are  seeking  a'fabulous 
chimera — what  they  call  millions — with  sharp, 
metallic  speech  like  the  click  of  a  telegraph, 
who  think  in  numbers  only  and  cabalistic  signs 
and  counters;  who  give  each  other  winks  and 
tips — men  that  know  everything  and  nothing, 
that  can  predict  eclipses  and  cause  them,  make 
famines  with  a  turn  of  the  wrist,  without  mean- 
ing any  harm;  these  fantastical  triflers,  fooling 
with  their  punk  in  the  powder  magazine — cer- 
tainly they  hold  their  place  by  a  slight  and  pre- 
carious tenure.  They  scarcely  touch  the  facts 
of  God's  earth  with  the  tips  of  their  toes,  and 
they  are  as  little  indigenous  here  as  shining 

U 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

angels  with  wings.  Their  ignorance  of  values 
is  profound.  They  know  not  how  much  blood 
goes  into  things.  And  they  are  practical  men 
in  the  same  sense  as  the  old-card-cronies  that  sit 
and  play  in  the  back  rooms  of  the  saloon  behind 
the  green  baize  screens.  They  know  the  rules 
of  the  games  that  they  have  spun  like  spiders 
out  of  their  own  bodies,  and  they  can  play  to 
win  without  troubling  to  think. 

The  business  interests  of  the  country— myste- 
rious, intangible  thing!  Do  the  business  inter- 
ests require  that  people  shall  be  fed  and  clothed 
and  housed?  And  does  the  doing  of  business 
mean  that  things  worth  doing  shall  get  done 
somehow?  No;  only  that  there  shall  be  bustle 
and  running  to  and  fro,  with  infinite  complica- 
tion of  accounts,  and  in  the  end  that  somebody 
shall— make  money!  Golden  cloudland  and 
most  delicate  moonshine !     Oh,  practical  men  I 

VIII. — And  has  any  one  yet  seen  a  cultivated 
man  or  made  the  acquaintance  of  a  man  of  the 
world?  Certainly  not  among  the  pampered  or 
the  privileged.  These  read  all  the  poems  of  the 
ages,  and  skim  through  all  the  sacred  books, 
but  do  not  understand  one  line;  flit  restlessly 
from  town  to  country  and  circumnavigate  the 
globe,  yet  never  see  a  sunrise  or  meet  a  man! 

15 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

How  can  one  who  lives  without  thanks  upon 
the  labor  of  others,  who  has  been  dandled  all 
his  life  in  the  strong  arms  of  the  laborers  so 
that  his  feet  have  never  for  a  moment  felt  the 
drastic  earth,  who  has  never  wrestled  naked 
with  God  for  a  blessing,  or  felt  a  common  ele- 
mental need — how  can  such  an  one  know  any- 
thing of  the  omens  of  history,  how  judge 
rightly  and  decide  what  is  human  and  of  immor- 
tal value  in  books  and  pictures,  or  what  is  just 
in  laws?  How  can  he  fight  the  battles  of  the 
weak,  or  answer  the  questions  of  the  simple; 
interpret  the  meaning  of  the  prophets,  or  com- 
prehend the  passion  of  Christ? 

Did  any  one  suppose  that  be  could  get  the 
humanities  and  leave  out  mankind? 

This  aristocracy  of  culture,  this  pomp  and 
foolery  of  bibelots,  must  seem  to  the  strong, 
battling  saints  and  scripture-makers  that  look 
down  upon  it,  like  a  masquerade  of  footmen, 
a  kind  of  high  life  below  stairs.  Is  it  not 
known  that  books  are  sacrificial,  that  they  must 
be  lived  and  suffered  before  they  are  written, 
and  lived  and  suffered  before  they  are  read? 

Is  not  a  poem  an  enterprise  and  an  act  of  faith? 
And  are  these  fireside  story-tellers,  these  table- 
talkers  and  ramblers  in  the  woods— poets?  Do 
tbogr  put  words  to  what  you  mean  to  do?    Are 

16 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

they  the  makers  of  new  cities  and  new  eras?  Are 
they  the  spokesmen  of  the  laborers?  Do  you 
think  they  know  what  Democracy  means?  Can 
they  put  into  speech  the  dumb,  passionate  long- 
ing of  the  people?  Can  they  face  a  mob  without 
flinching— the  mob  of  moneyed  men  and  men  of 
fashion  and  men  of  letters— and  the  madness  of 
the  people? 

IX.— -If  you  pass  by  the  least  considerable 
man,  you  pass  by  all  the  humanities  and  the 
divinities,  and  set  your  heart  on  what  is  tran- 
sient and  cheap.  There  is  a  wide  ocean  of  dif- 
ference between  taking  in  the  last  man  and 
leaving  him  out.  It  is  not  a  question  of  one 
man,  but  of  humanity.  If  you  leave  anybody 
out,  you  must  leave  your  own  soul  out,  and 
must  live  thenceforth  by  the  butler's  standard. 
It  is  a  fearful  thing  to  belong  to  the  exclusive 

circles. 

Every  interest  that  does  not  directly  relate  to 
the  soul  is  an  abstraction.  The  soul  is  the  con- 
crete absolute.  This  is  the  souPs  world  clear 
through,  and  the  inmost  law  of  it  is  the  law  of 
the  relation  of  persons.  And  to  deal  with  ma- 
terial objects  or  with  ideas  without  reference  to 
persons,  is  to  invert  the  order  of  the  universe 
and  to  take  things  altogether  as  they  are  not. 

17 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

Do  you  suppose  that  God  cares  anything  for 
His  performances  except  as  they  relate  to  per- 
sons? Do  you  suppose  that  He  is  vain  of  the 
shimmering  sea  or  the  tints  of  the  evening  sky? 
Do  you  not  understand  that  Life  rules  here,  and 
that  everything  exists  for  Life?  The  sun  does 
not  make  signs  to  the  moon,  and  the  stars 
do  not  beckon  one  another;  but  everything 
beckons  the  living  soul.  It  is  a  shame,  then,  to 
dodge  and  defer  to  things  or  to  3^our  own 
achievements  or  to  any  man's.  It  is  a  shame 
to  take  circuitous  courses  or  to  desire  social  con- 
sideration and  influence  as  a  means  of  accom- 
plishing one's  ends — as  if  one  were  a  stranger 
and  an  alien  here,  picking  his  way  fearfully 
through  an  enemy's  country  and  compelled  to 
make  the  most  of  a  scanty  equipment. 

You  need  not  be  afraid,  any  more  than  a 
duck  is  afraid  of  drowning  or  a  bird  of  falling, 
In  your  inmost  soul  you  are  as  well  suited 
to  the  whole  cosmical  order  and  every  part  of 
it  as  to  your  own  body.  You  belong  here.  Did 
you  suppose  that  you  belonged  to  some  other 
world  than  this,  or  that  you  belonged  nowhere 
at  all — were  just  a  waif  on  the  bosom  of  the 
eternities?  Is  not  that  unthinkable?  Incontest- 
ably  you  belong  here.  Have  not  the  biologists 
told  you  all  about  it?    Nothing  is  plainer  than 

18 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

that  God  has  been  at  measureless  pains  that 
you  should  suit  your  surroundings,  and  that 
your  surroundings  should  suit  you  with  a  per- 
fect correspondence  at  every  point.  Conceiva- 
bly He  might  have  flung  you  into  a  world  that 
was  unrelated  to  you,  and  might  have  left  you 
to  be  acclimated  at  your  own  risk ;  but  you  hap- 
pen to  know  that  this  is  not  the  case.  You  have 
lived  here  always;  this  is  the  ancestral  de- 
mesne ;  for  ages  and  ages  you  have  looked  out 
of  these  same  windows  upon  the  celestial  land- 
scape and  the  star-deeps.     You  are  at  home. 

X. — If  there  is  any  cosmical  ordinance  that 
you  do  not  like,  then  there  is  something  wrong 
with  you.  If  there  is  any  necessary  thing  that 
you  shrink  from — as  death,  or  labor,  or  growth 
and  long  waiting — then  you  are  not  well  and 
sound.  To  draw  back  from  a  fact  is  to  prefer  a 
lie. 

If  you  say  you  do  not  like  the  contact  of  the 
earth,  or  the  contact  of  the  people,  and  would 
withdraw  yourself  from  them,  then  there  is 
nothing  left  for  you  but  to  live  in  a  world  of 
phantoms  and  shadows.  A  hundred  million 
men,  possessed  of  the  same  illusions,  can  agree 
to  reject  death,  and  labor  and  love,  and  to  pass 
their  days  as  if  these  things  did  not  exist,  or 

19 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

were  altogether  alien;  they  can  agree  upon 
arbitrary  signs  and  can  regard  as  great  and 
weighty  the  things  of  their  own  imagination 
and  the  passing  fashions — but  they  are  dream- 
ers, and  the  facts  remain  to  be  reckoned  with 
at  last. 

The  cosmos  is  sound  all  through,  absolutely 
valid;  and  it  covers  the  whole  ground.  There 
is  no  room  for  another  universe.  If  you  do  not 
like  this  one,  the  door  is  open  into  the  inane. 

In  the  old  Hebrew  story,  Adam  would  not 
dress  and  keep  the  garden,  and  so  get  wise  in 
the  divine  and  vital  way  by  daily  contact  with 
real  things,  but  would  eat  wisdom  and  rumi- 
nate upon  it.  The  original  sin  was  the  rejec- 
tion of  the  real  world  and  a  flight  to  dreamland ; 
and  the  healing  penalty  was  a  hard  necessity 
that  should  draw  back  the  man  and  the  woman 
to  the  firm,  resistant  earth — labor,  in  bread- 
getting  and  in  child-bearing. 

All  the  failures  of  the  world  have  come  from 
this  flinching  from  the  keen  and  open  air — the 
attempt  to  escape  into  a  made-up  world  within 
fences  and  behind  doors.  The  failure  of  his- 
tory is  in  egotism,  and  this  is  egotism — to 
consider  oneself  as  having  no  essential  rela- 
tionships, no  Tootage  in  the  real  world. 


20 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

XI. — Does  there  rise  before  you  the  vision  of 
the  long-drawn  misery  and  terror  of  the  world, 
the  tyrannies  and  blasphemies,  the  collapses, 
the  mere  dull  cycles  and  aimless,  rotary  mo- 
tion? Do  you  feel  yourself  environed  to-day 
by  a  vast  and  intricate  fabric  of  make- 
believes,  and  things-agreed-upon — religions, 
politics,  and  social  customs  that  do  not  take  ac- 
count of  God  and  the  soul;  charitable  institu- 
tions contrived  as  makeshifts  to  avoid  the  in- 
sistent obligation  of  the  moral  law,  riches  that 
are  afraid  of  their  own  shadow,  and  poverty 
that  is  afraid  of  riches;  art  that  is  at  war  with 
nature ;  and  science  that  spies  and  pries  in  the 
forms  and  phenomena  of  things,  but  falters  at 
the  primal,  living  fact? 

Do  you  discern  the  cause  of  the  contradiction 
between  what  is  right  and  what  seems  to  be 
expedient?  On  one  hand  is  the  real  and  ele- 
mental world,  with  its  eternal  perspectives,  its 
insistent  and  tender  intimacies  with  your  inner 
heart,  commanding  your  trust  and  obedience, 
your  consecration  to  the  aim  of  God  in  the  ful- 
fillment of  the  destiny  of  mankind;  and  on  the 
other  hand  is  the  sham  world  fabricated  with 
immense  labor,  a  hundred  times  destroyed  by 
the  inrush  of  the  elements,  and  a  hundred  times 
reconstituted  by  the  conceit  and  fear  of  men — 

n 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

an  asylum  of  escape  from  nature,  and'truth,'and 
the  strong  compulsions  of  love  and  duty,  a  cas- 
tle of  compromise,  wherein  there  is  no  right  and 
no  wrong,  but  only  a  shifting  expediency  and 
escape  from  conclusions;  wherein  religion  is 
made  a  question  of  credulity  and  of  being 
baptized,  and  the  only  object  of  devotion  that 
is  offered  to  the  soul  is  comfort,  money,  and  to- 
be  v/ell  thought  of. 

Of  these  two  worlds,  it  is  the  latter — the 
world  of  compromises — that  is  nearest  at  hand 
and  most  in  evidence.  It  surrounds  you  and 
inmeshes  you.  If  you  start  to  do  anything  in 
a  straightforward  and  natural  way,  it  constrains 
and  embarrasses  you.  You  are  made  to  feel 
that  your  deepest  instincts  are  not  to  be  trusted, 
that  senility  is  wiser  than  youth,  that  the 
roundabout  way  is  shortest  to  your  aim,  and 
that  as  between  right  and  wrong,  the  truth  and 
a  lie,  a  middle  course  is  always  best.  The 
business  of  living  becomes  a  delicate  art  of  bal- 
ancing, everjT-thing  is  at  last  a  question  of  ex- 
pert testimony  and  statistics ;  there  is  no  sure 
good  or  sure  evil  until  after  all  the  committees 
have  reported ;  meanwhile,  your  aif air  is  to  be 
as  comfortable  as  you  can.  This  is  the  world 
that  environs  you  and  holds  you  close  in  its 
intricate  tissue  of  expediencies.     Over  beyond 

^'2 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

is  the  world  of  the  elemental  moral  forces,  the 
divine  passions  and  devotions,  the  world  where 
the  artists  work  free,  and  daring,  and  youth  is 
sure  and  swift  to  its  aim.  And  between  your 
world  of  prudent  hypocrisies  and  that  passion- 
ate, real  world,  there  is  a  valley  of  shadows 
and  dreadful  doubts. 

Do  you  not  see  that  there  is  need  of  but  just 
one  thing,  and  that  that  one  thing  is— faith? 

Have  faith,  then.  Come,  take  the  risks.  It 
is  time  to  go  through  the  valley  and  try  what 
is  beyond. 


fl^ 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


CHAPTER  11. 

THE  MAN  OF  THE  MODERN  SPIRIT. 

I. — The  greatness  of  the  modern  spirit  is  its 
humility.  It  keeps  close  to  the  puissant  ground; 
it  will  walk  in  the  real  world.  Do  not  be  de- 
ceived by  the  brag  and  flourish ;  the  heart  of 
the  age  is  humble.  And  it  is  only  by  humility 
that  you  can  enter  into  its  meaning,  utter  its 
longing,  or  fulfill  its  faith. 

The  modern  spirit  is  a  tall,  fair  woman, 
standing  at  her  door  expecting  to  see  the  Lord 
of  Heaven  and  Earth  pass  by  in  the  dusty  road 
and  get  a  message  from  Him.  Or  shall  we  say 
that  it  is  a  strong  man,  horsed  and  riding 
through  the  world,  challenging  all  pleasant 
lies  and  vain  pretensions,  seeking  a  sacred  fact 
even  in  the  face  of  despair,  and  as  he  rides, 
crying:  "Truth,  the  truth;  though  it  slay  me, 
yet  will  I  trust  it."  Or,  again,  it  is,  if  you 
like,  a  laborer,  crowned,  or  a  king  in  gray 
clothes,  toiling. 

The  quintessence  of  the  modern  spirit  is  faith 

24 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

in  the  incarnation.  Tiie  faith  that  has  gone  out 
from  the  pulpits  and  the  pews  is  walking 
abroad  in  the  streets.  Parsons  and  priests, 
synods  and  sacred  councils,  may  not  be  half  so 
sure  that  the  Son  of  God  must  needs  be  brought 
up  in  Nazareth  as  the  workers  and  fighters  are, 
and  the  plain  people  that  pass  by.  Do  you 
know  why  this  name  of  Jesus  pursues  you; 
why  you  cannot  turn  and  look  over  your  shoul- 
der without  seeing  Him,  or  something  that  re- 
minds you  of  Him?  It  is  because  He  is  the  man 
of  the  modern  spirit. 

He  does  not  talk  in  abstractions ;  He  is  con- 
crete, practical,  personal.  He  rests  on  what  He 
is — rests  on  the  facts  and  their  self-vindicating 
power.  He  makes  no  boasts  and  no  excuses. 
He  is  like  nature;  there  is  in  Him  the  calm  of 
nature  and  its  violence ;  the  passion  of  nature 
and  its  incompleteness  and  progress.  He  has 
nature's  grand  silences;  He  waits  sublimely. 
He  keeps  close  to  the  earth,  the  ground  is  al- 
ways under  His  feet.  A  sea  or  a  mountain  can- 
not put  Him  out  or  make  Him  little.  He  speaks 
with  authority  because  He  is  at  home  in  the 
world ;  He  rises  from  the  dead  because  He  is  on 
good  terms  with  death.  The  age  is  dawning 
that  shall  understand  these  things;  it  is  the 
mission  of  the  modern  spirit  to  explain  them. 

25 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

The  message  of  Jesus  is  moral  adventure; 
go  on,  take  the  risk;  commit  yourself  confi- 
dently to  the  eternal  currents  and  the  natural 
order. 

He  takes  in  the  unity  of  the  cosmos,  and  is 
tranquill}''  confident  of  the  validity  of  its  laws. 
He  is  determined  to  get  at  the  facts;  He 
shrinks  from  nothing,  not  from  disease,  or  the 
sweat  and  grime.  He  is  sure  of  the  inexhausti- 
ble resources  of  health  and  of  the  forgiveness 
of  sins.  He  never  compromises  because  He  is 
close  to  His  facts,  and  they  do  not  compromise. 
He  moves  straight  to  His  conclusion  with  an  in- 
flexible logic.  He  demonstrates  the  axioms  of 
the  concrete;  He  does  not  argue;  He  illustrates. 
His  is  the  absolute  science  and  the  consummate 
art  and  enterprise.  He  is  the  pioneer  of  a  new 
world,  and  the  Man  of  Destiny.  He  compre- 
hends Europe,  America  and  the  future.  He 
knows  what  is  bound  up  in  Democracy.  He 
radiates  courage  and  power,  and  to  believe  in 
Him  is  to  have  faith. 

II. — Shall  one  suppose  that  God  regards  a 
subject  from  all  sides  and  in  every  possible 
light  before  He  decides  what  to  do,  or  that  He 
attends  specifically  and  separately  to  every  mo- 
tion that  comes  from  the  brain  of  an  ant,  or  the 


I 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

wing  of  a  fly?  Is  it  not  plain  that  the  universe 
is  governed  by  vital  impulses;  that  millions  and 
millions  of  consequences  flow  from  the  whir  of 
a  fly's  wing,  and  that  its  footfall  shakes  the 
firmament?  Most  likely  God  does  not  attend 
to  the  consequences;  He  attends  to  the  life  of 

the  fly. 

You  lift  your  finger  and  stir  every  atom  m 
Sirius  and  Orion;  and  so  every  living  thing 
occupies  the  whole  universe,  and  has  something 
to  do  with  every  mass  and  every  motion.  How 
all  the  lines  cross  and  recross  in  an  infinite 
maze!  What  a  weltering .  palimpsest  is  the 
world  of  phenomena!  No  man  ever  read  a 
word  of  it  except  he  had  the  key  of  it  all  in  his 

own  soul. 

Behind  mass  and  motion  is  might,  and  back 
of  might  is  mind ;  and  the  beginning  of  science 
is  in  congeniality  with  God. 

The  larger  word  for  science  is  conscience. 
And  the  final  test  of  the  authenticity  and  per- 
manence of  a  physical  fact  is  its  moral  reason- 
ableness—its congruity  with  right.  Do  you 
protest  sometimes  with  vehemence  that  God  is 
cruel  and  unjust?  Justice  must  then  be  rooted 
very  deep  in  the  heart  of  things,  since  it  dares 
=-~-te  confront  omnipotence  with  a  fist  so  feeble  to 
back  its  claim !    But  you  say  well ;  you  must 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

not  submit  to  be  bullied  by  earthquakes  and 
tornadoes,  or  by  the  sun,  moon  and  stars.  If 
royalties,  and  usuries,  and  monopolies  are  un- 
just, they  must  not  be  tolerated ;  and  if  gravita- 
tion and  cohesion  are  unjust,  they  must  be  put 
down. 

III. — Unless  you  believe  in  the  reasonable- 
ness of  the  world  it  is  idle  to  think  about  it  at 
all.  And  if  you  should  spend  your  life  in  plot- 
ting to  escape  what  is  inevitable  or  in  denying 
the  plain  ordinances  of  human  kinship,  then 
you  would  be  derationalized ;  and  science  would 
become  impossible  to  you.  If  one  is  unloving 
and  a  coward,  it  is  impossible  that  he  should 
know  anything;  there  is  no  use  in  having 
brains  without  faith  and  courage. 

A  man  cannot  stand  aside  and  learn  the  lavv^s 
of  this  whirring,  dangerous  world  by  holding 
out  his  brains  at  arm's  length;  his  frail  body 
must  go  with  his  brains  into  the  midst  of  the 
melee.  You  cannot  learn  any  more  than  you 
now  know  without  venturing  something  that 
you  have  not  tried.  Did  any  one  suppose  that, 
sitting  at  ease  in  his  study  chair,  cushioned  and 
walled  in,  he  could  draw  knowledge  out  of 
printed  books?  It  is  impossible.  And  Holy 
Scripture,  when  the  devil  reads  it,  is  devilish. 

28 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

For  a  long  while  we  have  been  under  the 
spell  of  those  men  of  science  that  have  fancied 
that  they  could  separate  their  minds  from  them- 
selves, have  supposed  that  they  could  set  their 
brains  working  in  the  midst  of  things,  while 
themselves  standing  aloof,  disengaged  and  non- 
chalant, waiting  for  results.     They  have  sent 
forth  the  fabulous  instrument  of  knowledge  as 
far  as  possible  from  the  center  of  the  w^arm 
and  vital  sphere  of  human   feeling,  and  have 
set  it  down   on  the  frontiers  of  consciousness, 
where  humanity  is  reduced  to  its  lowest  terms 
almost    is     not     humanity.       If     they    could, 
wholly  outside   of  consciousness    they   would' 
have  done  it;  but  they  could  not.   So  they  have 
put  up  with  so  much  of  feeling  as  goes  to  the 
perception  that  things  are  bulky  and  that  they 
move.     It  is  not  much  of  a  perception ;  proba- 
bly worms  can  perceive  that  much.     Starting 
thus,  the  aim  of  these  absent-minded  savants 
has  been  to  work  their  machine  of  knowledge 
back  to  themselves,  taking  notes  by  the  way, 
automatic,  mecbanical,  exact.   They  have  tried 
to  explain  themselves  by  something  as  nearly 
as  possible  foreign   to  themselves,  to  construe 
love  and  rage  and  hunger  in  terms  of  mass  and 
motion.     It   is   prodigious    gymnastics,  but  it 
will  have  to  be  given  up. 

29 


The  Religion  of  Democricy. 

And  3'et  this  thing  which  has  been  called  the 
method  of  science  is  not  wholly  perverse.  It 
has  a  history  and  a  rationale,  an  excuse — even  a 
kind  of  justification.  So  long  had  men  looked 
out  upon  the  world  with  mere  greed  and  fear, 
so  long  had  they  looked  through  eyes  blinded 
with  passion  and  seen  only  the  reflection  of 
their  own  superstition  and  lust,  so  long  been 
confounded  by  the  irrefragible  fact,  which 
never  would  wait  upon  their  wishes;  it  was 
natural  and  inevitable  that  science  should  turn 
ascetic  and  pharis^o,  that  it  should  mortify 
and  flagellate  every  human  feeling,  should  re- 
solve to  be  only  eye — as  the  monks  of  the  desert 
resolved  to  be  only  soul— that  it  should  reject 
the  cosmic  gospel,  worship  the  law,  and  crucify 
the  Son  of  Man.  It  was  a  bitter  error  and  fail- 
ure, but  it  was  natural  enough. 

So,  then,  both  the  old  knowledge  roads  turn 
out  to  be  blind  alleys.  One  we  have  already 
decided  to  abandon,  and  the  other  we  shall 
soon  give  up.  Not  if  we  know  it  do  we  travel 
nov/  the  old  blundering  road  of  rapturous 
superstition  and  conceit,  expecting  the  laws 
of  the  universe  to  budge  and  conform  when- 
ever we  cry  or  clap  our  hands.  Our  dis- 
illusioned savants  have  fixed  their  no-thor- 
oughfare at  the  hither  end  of  that  byway, 

30 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

and  so  have  done  us  a  service.  But  the  road 
that  they  have  led  us  into  is  bad  with  an- 
other kind  of  badness;  and  there  is  a  blank  wall 
at  the  end  of  it,  with  a  death's-head  on  it  for  a 
sign.  That  road,  too,  we  shall  abandon,  and 
turn  back  with  shuddering  fear.  The  haughty 
high  priests  of  science  may  rend  their  gaber- 
dines and  cry  their  law;  but  we  will  not  listen, 
for  by  their  law  we  die.'  And  the  emaciated 
scientific  monks  may  preach  from  their  pillars 
their  stifling  clinic  gospel  till  they  drop,  but 
they  cannot  stay  us.  The  heart  of  the  age  is 
hungering  against  them  for  love  and  liberty; 
for  health  and  the  tonic  air. 

IV. — The  way  of  valid  science  is  the  way  of 
the  modern  spirit.  It  begins  with  an  act  of 
faith — an  immense  assumption — to  wit,  that  the 
whole  world  is  constitutionally  at  one  with  it- 
self;  that  it  is  a  universe;  that  it  has  no  alien 
elements,  no  unassimilable  fate,  no  intrinsic 
contradictions.  This  assumption  is  the  great 
adventure  of  the  age.  We  are  committing  our- 
selves to  it  without  calculating  the  conse- 
quences. It  distinguishes  this  age  from  all 
other  ages  as,  par  excellence,  the  age  of  faith. 

There  is  nowhere  in  Europe  or  America  to- 
day an  accepted  philosophy  that  can  be  called 

31 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

skeptical  in  the  ancient  sense  of  that  word. 
Nobody  denies  now  the  possibility  of  knowl- 
edge; nobody  draws  a  crowd  now  to  the  teach- 
ing that  the  world  is,  for  practical  purposes, 
unknowable.  The  nearest  approach  to  old-time 
skepticism  is  made  by  the  straight  sect  of  ortho- 
dox theologians.  For  to  teach,  as  they  do,  that 
the  most  useful  and  important  knowledge  can 
neither  be  got  nor  proved  by  contact  of  living 
men  with  the  present  world,  but  must  be 
handed  down  from  some  luminous  spot  in  the 
past  and  received  by  authoritj^— this  is  pretty 
nearly  Pj'rrhonism:  it  is  Pyrrhonism  plus  a 
miracle  or  two. 

The  vast  majority  of  our  contemporaries, 
now  in  the  dawn  of  the  twentieth  century,  for 
the  first  time  in  history  are  ready  to  assume 
somewhat  recklessly  and  airily  for  the  most 
part,  as  not  counting  the  cost,  but  in  good  faith, 
too,  that  the  whole  world  is  reasonable,  that  it 
hangs  together  to  the  minutest  detail,  and  that 
there  are  no  gaps  or  crevasses  in  it  to  swallow 
up  the  mind.  This  assumption  is  made  in  the 
face  of  death,  disease,  the  antagonism  of  na- 
tional and  private  interests  and  the  sum  total 
of  adverse  experience.  It  is  a  magnificent 
risk;  probably  most  of  us  would  shrink  from  it 
if  we  should  measure  the  height  and  depth  of  it. 

d'2 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

Nay,  do  we  not  all  shrink  and  falter  and  deny 
the  spirit  of  the  age?  The  first  comer  will  tell 
you  that  in  his  view  death  and  labor  are  a  dis- 
advantage, and  that  his  interest  and  yours  are 
at  variance. 

-  But  if  death  is  a  disdvantage,  and  yet  is  in- 
evitable, how  then  can  the  world  be  reasonable? 
And  if  your  interest  is  opposed  to  your  neigh- 
bor's, what  becomes  of  the  congruity  of  things 
and  the  unity  of  the  world?  If  that  is  good  for 
him  which  is  bad  for  you,  then  there  are  at 
least  two  universes— yours  and  his;  and  two 
gods,  or  else  there  is  confusion  and  no  God. 

v.— You  cannot  understand  what  God  does 
unless  you  are  of  the  same  stuff  as  God.  Shall 
the  clay  say  to  the  potter:  What  doest  thou? 
Can  things  be  understood  by  a  thing?  Must 
not  the  creature  pass  over  to  the  status  of  the 
Creator  before  it  can  understand  anything  of 
the  creation?  Can  a  savant  be  other  than  a 
savior?  Does  any  one  suppose  that  a  man  that 
feels  that  he  is  transient  and  is  afraid  of  death, 
can  make  contributions  to  science,  or  that  that 
which  flows  ^ith  the  stream  can  measure  its 
force  or  survey  it? 

It  is  a  vast  pretension,  but  doubtless  it  is  the 
will  of  God  that  it  should  be  made.     The  chil- 

33 


1 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

dren  of  the  spirit  of  the  age  are  passing  the 
timid  and  halting  creeds,  and  professing  their 
confidence  in  the  possibility  of  science.  Mys- 
tics! Transcendentalists  I  They  will  believe 
what  they  cannot  prove,  if  only  it  is  reason- 
able, and  they  will  deny  what  seems  most  obvi- 
ous, if  it  is  absurd. 

It  is  announced  that  it  is  not  necessary  to 
clutch  at  the  face  of  nature  for  a  living;  that 
we  are  here  to  stay,  and  that  there  is  harm,  not 
in  hunger  or  death,  but  only  in  that  which  is 
inhuman. 

They  do  not  offer  proofs  that  pain  is  power- 
less, that  it  is  expedient  to  be  just,  or  that  the 
soul  is  immortal.  But  they  accept  the  wit- 
ness of  the  spirit  of  the  age  that  God  is  reason- 
able, and  that  we  can  get  rid  of  our  unreason- 
ableness and  can  understand  His  meaning. 
Pain,  then,  will  be  to  us  what  it  is  to  Him ;  jus- 
tice will  be  as  good  for  us  as  it  is  for  Hiro,  and 
we  shall  not  die  unless  He  dies,  nor  be  impris- 
oned unless  He  is  arrested.  The  spirit  comes 
with  no  credentials  that  can  be  weighed  in  the 
higgling  scale  of  culture;  there  are  no  certifi- 
cates or  statistics.  Confessedly  this  is  a  jan- 
gling world  for  one  bent  on  quick  pleasures,  but 
there  may  be  rhythm  and  music  in  it  for  a  lover 
who  can  wait. 

34 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

The  propositions  of  the  spirit  are  not  on 
trial,  but  the  world  is  on  trial.  The  sunset  of 
the  age  is  full  of  flaming  portents.  So  it  was  at 
the  end  of  the  eighteenth,  and  at  the  beginning 
of  the  nineteenth  century.  They  set  up  then 
on  the  altar  of  the  Church  of  Our  Lady  in  Paris 
a  kind  of  hoyden  Goddess  of  Reason — striking 
symbol  of  a  science  that  rejected  the  generous 
risks  of  faith,  and  would  make  sure  of  its  pas- 
times. The  portents  were  then  fulfilled,  and 
the  science  that  would  risk  nothing  lost  every- 
thing— lost  its  senses  at  last,  and  went  stark 
mad.  It  shall  not  be  so  again  if  it  can  be 
helped.  There  may  be  blood  and  tears,  but  not 
like  that.  It  is  necessary  to  deal  more  mag- 
nanimously with  God,  and  take  the  risks. 


35 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


CHAPTER  III. 

THE  REVOLUTION  ABSOLUTE. 

I. — Democracy  implies  infinity.  Men  are 
declared  to  be  equal  because  it  is  discovered 
that  all  men,  the  least  as  well  as  the  greatest, 
have  or  may  have  access  to  the  Infinite.  The 
obvious  disparities  become  insignificant,  in 
view  of  this  great  commonness.  Infinity  plus 
a  million  is  seen  to  be  no  more  than  infinity 
plus  one.  If  it  were  not  for  religion  democracy 
would  be  inconceivable;  if  a  man's  soul  is 
measurable  and  transient,  democracy  is  ridicu- 
lous. 

II. — At  the  heart  of  life  there  is  a  primal 
contradiction.  That  is  why  the  deepest  sayings 
have  the  form  of  paradox — as  that  a  man  must 
die  to  live;  must  lose  his  life  to  find  it. 

To  resolve  this  antinomy  is  to  resolve  all 
antinomies;  it  lies  back  of  all  and  comprehends 
all.  It  is  the  Sphinx  riddlo  of  the  ages,  and  it 
gives  to  life  its  tragic  perplexity.     It  is  the 

36 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

burden  and  passion  of  the  social  struggle  upon 
which  we  are  entering.  Never  before  was  the 
question  proposed  so  squarely  and  inevitably ; 
never  before  did  the  world-issue  translate  itself 
into  historic  terms  so  concrete  and  practical. 
That  is  why  this  period  is  the  most  signal  and 
momentous  of  all  historic  epochs.  The  revolu- 
tion that  is  impending  is  not  relative  and  pro- 
visional; it  is  the  revolution  absolute. 

The  world  riddle  may  be  come  at  in  three 
principal  ways:  to  wit,  p.s  cosmical— compre- 
hending the  whole  world  process;  as  historical 
— having  relation  to  the  narrower  horizon  of 
human  history ;  and  as  personal,  relating  to  the 
issues  of  the  individual  life. 

Regarding  the  cosmical  process,  we  see,  to 
speak  according  to  the  books,  the  mechanical 
passing  into  the  chemical,  chemical  into  vital, 
vital  into  psychic,  and  psychic  into  spiritual. 
The  divisions  are  arbitrary  and  school-made, 
and  they  have  served  to  complicate  the  simple 
principle  that  is  involved.  The  process  has 
been  called  evolution :  it  may  be  that,  but  it 
is  more;  it  is  revolution.  It  is  characteristic- 
ally, not  only  a  development,  but  a  conver- 
sion ;  not  only  a  progression,  but  a  right-about- 
face.  The  object  becomes  subject;  the  thing 
made  becomes  maker;  the  clay  becomes  potter. 

37 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

III. —Regard  the  historic  drama.  History 
begins  with  the  birth  of  the  idea  of  liberty; 
what  went  before  was  prehistoric,  dim,  undif- 
ferentiated, protoplasmic.  The  primeval  tribe 
and  village  commune,  brooding  under  the 
unchallenged  sway  of  habit  and  tradition,  are 
cast  for  no  role  in  the  historic  drama.  Theirs 
is  the  prologue  of  the  play,  serving  only  to  indi- 
cate the  point  from  which  the  story  runs.  His- 
tory begins  when  the  hard  cake  of  custom  is 
shattered  by  ambition  and  the  will-to-live.  The 
action  is  dual,  has  two  principal  phases;  and 
these  stand  in  sharp  contrast  and  contradic- 
tion.    History  is  ancient  and  modern. 

The  ancient  spirit  had  free  course  until  this 
era;  it  maintains  a  prevailing  influence  to  this 
day.  The  modern  spirit  proceeds  from  the  Man 
of  Nazareth ;  it  grapples  with  the  other  in  irre- 
ducible antagonism.  Both  strive  for  liberty; 
but  the  liberty  of  one  is  in  self-assertion,  of  the 
other  in  self-abandonment.  One  has  pride,  au- 
thority, ambition,  circumspection;  the  other, 
humor,  veracity,  enterprise,  insight.  One  finds 
its  characteristic  expression  in  philosophy,  the 
other  in  science.  The  master  of  all  ancient  so- 
ciety—and of  modern  society  only  in  its  failure 
and  reaction— is  the  self-made  man— or,  if  you 
please,  the    cultivated    man — the    man  intent 

38 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

upon  the  process  of  his  own  making.    The  idea 
that  life  is  fulfilled  through   studied  effort  to 
make  the  most  of  oneself  was  the  idea  of  Cato 
as  well  as  Caiaphas.  Pericles  and  Plato,  Seneca 
and  Cicero,  all  gave  their  best  energies  to  self- 
improvement— if  not  to  material  advancement, 
then  to  intellectual  and  spiritual  culture.    They 
were  all  self-made  men.     There  is  the  pomp 
and  pretentiousness,  the  artificiality  and  rejec- 
tion of  nature's  flowing  grace.     And  there  is 
about  them  all  a  touch  of  that  self-conciousness 
that  belongs  to  men  that  have  made  themselves 
and  are  disposed  to  admire  the  performance—a 
certain  lack  of  humor,  or,  if  you  please,  of  humil- 
ity.    The  notion  that  the  creations  of  antique 
art  are  representative  of  the  tone  and  color  of 
antique  living  is  one  of  the  great    historical 
illusions;  they  were  but  wistfully  reminiscent 
of  a  fancied  golden  age  that  had  passed  away. 
Great  Pan  was  dead,  and  the  sweet  divinities 
had  fled  from  wood  and  stream  before  the  dawn 
'  of  history.    When  the  self-made  man  came  into 
the  world,  the  gods  of  nature  gave  up  and  left. 
The  gayety  of  nature  is  a  gift  that  the  mod- 
ern  spirit  has  in  store;   for  characteristically 
the  modern  man  is  not  proud,  but  keeps  to  the 
ground.     He  cares  not  much  for  what  is  called 
culture,  feeling  that  it  is  somehow  vitally  ab- 

39 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

surd  that  a  man  should  fix  his  eyes  on  his  own 
spiritual  processes  or  spend  his  time  in  improv- 
ing his  own  mind  or  his  own  soul.  The  mod- 
ern man  cares  for  science  and  reverences  a 
fact,  keeps  close  to  the  real  world  and  gives 
himself  to  his  work.  His  concern  is  with 
things  external  to  himself,  and  he  counts  him- 
self successful  as  he  becomes  participant  in  the 
ordinary  business  of  the  universe.  The  man 
of  the  ancient  spirit  fled  from  the  common  peo- 
ple ;  the  modern  man  turns  back  to  the  laborers 
and  the  poor. 

In  a  word,  the  typical  man  of  the  old  order 
feels  himself  caught  and  confounded  in  the  cre- 
ation, and  his  freedom  is  to  get  out  to  the 
Creator;  while  the  typical  man  of  the  new  order 
feels  himself  identified  with  the  Creator,  and 
his  freedom  is,  like  God's,  to  get  into  the  crea- 
tion. 

The  historic  drama  thus  reveals  the  same 
contradiction  that  we  encounter  on  the  wider 
stage  of  the  cosmos.  The  innumerable  contra- 
dictions of  history  are  resolvable  into  one  primal 
contradiction.  The  object  becomes  subject; 
man  passes  from  the  status  of  the  creature  to 
that  of  the  creator.  The  old  order  is  not  im- 
proved, but  is  dissolved  by  its  antithesis.  Histo- 
ry is  not  only  evolutionary,    but   revolution- 

40 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

IV. — We  discern  the  same  principle  again 
when  we  look  to  the  issues  of  life  in  the  individ- 
ual. The  typical  man  is  a  microcosm  and  he 
resumes  in  his  own  experience  the  history  of 
the  race.  His  life  is  a  revolution.  At  first  he 
broods  and  is  silent;  he  is  protoplasmic,  tribal, 
passive.  He  rises  thence  to  the  passion  for 
liberty — feeling  the  encumbrance  and  con- 
straint of  the  creation.  He  tries  to  escape  into 
the  ideal — becomes  an  ambitious  dreamer,  a 
philosopher,  and  politician,  and  breaks  with 
his  kin  to  dispute  with  the  doctors.  With  the 
refinement  of  his  will  he  is  more  subtly  beset 
with  the  longing  for  power  and  prodigy  and 
glory,  and  these  things  possess  him  for  a  time. 
But  to  the  strophe  succeeds  the  antistrophe. 
In  the  crisis  of  his  life  he  puts  behind  him  all 
the  things  that  had  been  set  before  him,  and 
faces  the  other  way.  Thenceforward  his  in- 
terest is  not  what  may  become  of  him,  but 
what  may  the  creation  become,  and  he  sets  his 
face  steadfastly  toward  Jerusalem.  He  is  no 
longer  creature,  but  creator;  not  made,  but  be- 
gotten; not  the  child  of  heredity  fatality  and 
circumstance,  but  the  Son  of  God.  This  was 
the  beginning  of  modernity. 

V. — Democracy  stands  to-day  at  the  grand 

41 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

junction  and  crossroads  of  history.  The  world- 
antinomy  now  announces  itself  in  unescapable 
contradictions.  The  old  order  and  the  self- 
made  man  have  now  at  length  to  reckon  with 
the  new  order  and  the  man  of  the  modern  spir- 
it. We  can  postpone  the  issue  no  longer.  De- 
mocracy now  at  length,  the  world  over,  takes 
in  the  last  man ;  and  that  is  fatal  to  the  old 
way  of  the  world.  For  the  last  man  is  a  mil- 
lion— the  hitherto  bulked,  estimated  multitude. 
It  was  something  that  the  masses  should  get 
themselves  enumerated,  and  should  become  a 
multitude.  But  that  is  nothing  to  what  is  in 
store;  the  counters  are  going  to  take  a  hand  in 
the  play. 

This  is  the  very  whirlwind  of  moral  revolu- 
tion. The  world  has  never  seen  anything  like  it 
up  to  this  date.  Always,  heretofore,  revolutions 
have  meant  merely  some  wider  distribution  of 
privilege,  more  top  hats  and  togas,  and  that  ten 
thousand  instead  of  ten  should  mulct  the  multi- 
tude. But  now.at  length  it  has  been  decided 
that  the  multitude  should  not  be  mulcted  any 
more;  and  this  resolution,  adhered  to,  will  turn 
the  world  around  and  set  the  foundations  of 
society  on  new  and  hitherto  undiscovered  bases. 

The  bottom  fact  of  social  philosophy,  rang- 
ing wide  through  literature,  the  amenities  and 

42 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

courtesies,  religion  and  the  fine  arts,  is  an  econo 
mic  fact.  The  books  and  pictures,  the  etiquettes 
and  rituals,  are  what  they  are,  accordiog  to 
the  terms  of  the  settlement  of  the  bread  ques- 
tion. And  this,  not  because  flesh  is  God,  but 
because  God  is  flesh. 

Now  the  broadest,  the  basic  fact  of  the  old 
world   which   democracy   comes  to  destroy,  is 
that  it  has  got  its  bread  with  injustice.     The 
old  world  has  been,   by  the  witness  of  all  the 
wise,  a    vain   world    and    a   liar,  a   world   of 
dreams    and    inveterate    illusions.      And    the 
spring  and  source  of  all  its  lies  is  theft.   Specu- 
lative mistakes  in  the  theory  of  morals  may  be 
got   along   with;    it  is  the  practical  lie    that 
kills.     And  theft  is  the  root  of  all  abstraction 
—the  very  substance  of  vanity,  the  stuff  that 
dreams  are  made  of. 

Always  one  class  has  preyed  upon  another 
class.  The  strong,  from  the  beginning,  have 
stolen  their  bread;  and,  what  is  worse,  they 
have  despised  their  bakers.  They  have  dis- 
credited the  natural  facts  of  alimentation,  and 
they  have  sponged  upon  the  poor.  What  hope 
of  wise,  deliberate  science,  of  joyous,  perennial 
art  and  permanent  civic  glory  in  a  world  that 
is  ashamed  of  its  stomach,  filches  its  food,  and 
despises  the  souls  of  laborers?     What  hope  of 

43 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

religion  if  you  flout  the  central  sacrament  of 
the  body  of  God? 

To  be  sure,  there  has  always  been  a  man  that 
would  not  lie — an  artist,  a  poet;  there  have 
been  true  books  and  pictures,  and  perfect  deeds, 
an  unbroken  tradition  and  prophecy  of  democ- 
racy. Nobody  ever  wrote,  ruled,  carved  or 
painted,  and  left  any  one  out,  without  leaving 
himself  out,  and  being  forgotten.  The  torch  has 
been  carried  on,  but  flickering,  like  a  candle  in 
a  cave.  And  the  prophecy  is  still  waiting  its 
fulfillment. 

Do  you  wonder  that  the  fine  arts  are  overfine 
or  underfine ;  that  their  beauty  is  wistful ;  that 
the  literatures  lapse  and  die,  and  the  great 
scriptures  of  the  world,  given  for  joy,  sound  in 
our  ears  only  of  judgment;  that  history  swirls 
in  dizzy,  bewildering  cycles;  that  science  is  full 
of  panic  and  terror,  and  philosophy  is  only  a 
wan  surmise?  It  is  to  be  written  on  the  sepul- 
chers  of  the  old  cities :  They  took  the  bread  of 
the  poor,  and  they  despised  the  souls  of  the 
laborers. 

VI. — Yet  remember  this  contempt  for  the 
poor  is  not  the  imperfection,  the  flaw  in  the  old 
social  systems  that  are  passing.  It  is  their 
principle,  and  sine  qua  non.     The  flaw  is  the 

44 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

suspicion  of  an  infinite  soul,  a  qualm  of  the 
sense  of  eternity.  So  long  as  contempt  for  the 
poor  is  steadfast  and  consistent,  it  furnishes  an 
entirely  practicable  ground  of  social  stability. 
It  bases  and  sanctions  a  social  arrangement 
that  is  satisfactory  to  the  strong— to  those  able 
to  maintain  it— and  unsatisfactory  only  to  the 
weak,  who  are  unable  to  overthrow  it.  On  the 
one  side,  the  gains  are  allied  to  force ;  and  on 
the  other,  loss  goes  hand  in  hand  with  disa- 
bility. That  is  a  workable  arrangement;  left  to 
itself  it  might  endure  a  million  years.  But  it 
has  not  been  left  to  itself.  There  has  come  into 
the  world  a  great  power  of  revolution.  Con- 
tempt of  the  poor  has  been  abashed  in  a  great 
presence— the  presence  of  a  poor  man— a  la- 
borer and  a  victim.  The  awe  of  suffering,  de- 
feat, death— that  is  the  destroyer  of  the  aristo- 
cratic regime.  The  man  of  the  people  is  the 
man  of  sorrows. 

VII. -—The  man  willing  to  die  becomes  the 
master  of  the  world.  This  is  an  overture  of 
universal  emancipation;  it  excludes  no  one. 
The  beginning  of  liberty  is  the  discovery  of 
the  beautifulness  and  the  infinite  succor  of 
death.  There  can  be  no  freedom  amoEg  men 
who  are  afraid  to  die ;  and  a  people  to  whom 

45 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

snccess  is  necessary  cannot  build  a  city  that  is 
great.  The  cities  of  the  world,  New  York, 
London,  Paris,  are  provincial ;  we  have  yet  to 
build  a  metropolis — a  city  of  the  soul,  a  city 
whose  citizens  are  not  afraid  of  death — a  capi- 
tal of  democracy.  Death  is  the  revealer  of  the 
soul;  therefore  death  is  the  great  democrat. 

VIII. — The  soul  is  infinite,  and  it  cannot  rest 
until  it  rests  in  the  infinite.  But  lust  and  hun- 
ger are  not  infinite,  and  neither  are  the  titil- 
lations  of  pleasure  and  praise.  And  the  agony 
or  hope  of  unescapable  death — of  involuntary 
dying — these  one  can  measure.  But  there  is 
something  in  death  itself  and  in  the  master  of 
death  that  you  cannot  measure.  There  is  no 
infinity  in  just  dying;  but  to  see  a  man  that  is 
willing  to  die  for  love,  that  goes  to  meet  death 
in  the  way,  that  makes  a  boast  of  pain,  and, 
with  perfect  sweetness  and  sanity,  celebrates 
defeat — that  is  to  be  witness  of  the  palpable 
infinite.  It  is  like  an  arrow  passing  swiftly 
up  into  the  air  and  not  returning;  like  the  still 
energy  of  planets  or  the  resistless  growing  of 
the  grass,  or  like  the  haunting,  thrilling  mur- 
mur of  remembered  music  that  faded  down  the 
avenue  as  the  soldiers  went  to  war.  You  are 
left  endlessly  expectant ;  you  cannot  come  to  an 

46 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

end,  but  must  follow  that  which  is  beyond,  and 
still  beyond. 

This  is  greatness.  In  this  immensity  the 
soul  comes  to  its  own  and  finds  what  is  good 
and  satisfactory.  It  is  this  that  is  intended  by 
the  repose  in  action,  the  poised  energy  of  great 

art. 

It  remains  with  you  and  consoles.  After 
the  money-lord  has  passed  by,  clinking  his 
gold,  and  the  war-lord,  clanking  his  steel,  this 
stays,  and  is  sufficiently  great. 

IX.— Is  it  to  be  supposed  that  the  people  will 
prefer  what  they  know  is  transient  and  cheap? 
Do  you  expect  that  they  will  defer  to  the 
learned  after  they  themselves  have  read  books ; 
that  they  will  take  counsel  of  Croesus  after 
they  know  how  millions  are  made  and  have 
traced  the  processes ;  or  that  they  will  adore  suc- 
cessful warriors  when  fighting  has  become  safe 
to  those  who  know  how  to  manage  the  ma- 
chines, and  they  themselves  know  how?  Is  it 
not  plain  that  men  have  always  given  their 
homage  only  to  the  persons  and  things  that 
have  stood  for  the  immeasurable — the  infinite; 
that  scholars  have  been  looked  up  to  because 
books  and  brains  were  a  mystery ;  rich  men,  be- 
cause riches  were  supposed  to  go  with  godlike 

47 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

gifts  and  manners ;  and  fighters,  because  they 
died  fighting? 

Sic  transit  gloria  mundi!  Now  that  it  has 
been  discovered  with  how  little  wisdom  the 
world  is  governed,  what  fresh  adventure  is  left 
to  a  man  of  spirit  but  to  be  honest  and  to  be- 
lieve in  God ! 

X.— -The  old  order  is  passing,  and  the  new  is 
swiftly  preparing.    It  is  nothing  that  the  in- 
capable and  those  that  fail  are  discontented. 
If  that  were  all,  there  might  indeed  be  social 
changes — even  what  is  called  a  revolution ;  but 
it  would  be  only  an  oscillation,  a  vicissitude,  a 
jar.  There  might  be  a  new  distribution  of  gains 
and  honors;   some  would  get  more  of  praise 
and  money  than  had  been  the  former  wont, 
and  some  less.     But  the  old  order,  the  world  of 
the  self-made  man,  would  abide  after  all.      The 
money  and  the  honors  would  go  to  those  that 
were  strong  and  cunning  enough  to  get  and 
keep  them,  and  the  foundation  of  the  social 
peace  would  rest  upon  things  in  sight,  the  phe- 
nomenal, the  transient,  as  of  old.     It  is  noth- 
ing that  those  who  fail  are  discontented ;  they 
always,  alas !  were  discontented.    But  now  those 
also  that  can  move  things  and  prevail  are  smit- 
ten at  the  heart,  and  restless;  the  successful  are 

48 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

discontented  with  their   success.     That  is  of 
great  omen.     Not  passionate,  vacillating,  inco- 
herent sans  culotterie  alone  is  in  revolt,  but  the 
principled,  punctual  world-power    is  insurgent 
against  itself— a   quite  unprecedented  state  of 
things.    There  will  be  great  changes— the  mak- 
ing of  a  new  world.     The  little  revolutions  are 
little  because  they  begin  at  the  bottom,  and  es- 
say to  run  up;  but  the  great  revolution  of  the 
world  begins  at  the  top  and,  in  the  course  of 
nature,  runs,  gathering    mightily,  down.     But 
do  not  mistake  the  upper  classes.    They  are  the 
people  that  can  steadily  will.    They  do  not  nec- 
essarily   live    on    the,  avenues,  or    have  five 
courses  at  dinner.     They  are  the  youth  of  the 
world,  and  the  people  of  sound  nerves,  those 
that  have  courage  and  that  grip  the  real  things. 
These  are  holding  indignation  meetings  every- 
where to  protest  against  their  own  prosperity. 
It  is  an  augury  of  the  very  greatest  event— 
the  revolution  of  revolutions. 

For  history  can  know  but  one  great  revolu- 
tion. Only  once  can  the  world  turn  prodig- 
iously on  its  moral  axis,  shifting  its  center  of 
gravity  from  the  temporal  to  the  eternal.  It 
has  taken  thousands  of  years  to  prepare  for 
this,  and  it  may  take  as  many  thousand  more 
to  fulfill  it.     But  there  is  a  moment  in  time, 

49 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

a  supremely  critical  moment,  when  the  scale 

turns. 

A  featherweight  may  turn  the  balance  of 
tons,  and  a  footfall  on  the  mountain  may  start 
an  avalanche.  So  the  grand  crisis  of  the  world 
may  come  and  go,  and  the  occasion  be  not  other 
than  a  little  thing. 

XI.— We  see  the  old  order — the  regime  of 
the  self-made  man — in  the  latter  degrees  of  de- 
crepitude. It  is  sick  to  exhaustion.  Its  pride 
is  flouted  in  the  streets  and  its  props  are  decay- 
ing. The  people  do  not  have  respect  for  digni- 
ties any  more,  and  they  cannot  any  longer  be 
ruled  by  dignities. 

Aristocracy  has  had  its  gifts  and  virtues. 
One  is  sorry  to  see  them  go — rather,  one  would 
be  sorry  if  one  really  supposed  that  they  were 
going;  that  other  than  the  clothes  and  skins  of 
them  were  going.  And  since  the  people  do  not 
now  care  for  these  brave,  fair-showing  things, 
and  will  not  give  them  reverence,  let  us  weep 
for  the  loss  of  beauty,  having  first  made  sure 
that  beauty  is  really  lost. 

Democracy  has  shown  ugly  features;  there 
have  been  times  when  one  might  have  wished 
it  out  of  the  world.  It  has  ruined  many  good 
pictures,  broken  acres  of  painted  windows  and 

50 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

corrupted  court  manners  to  a"common  level.  A 
satyr-hoof  has  been  in  all  the  rose  gardens,  and 
has  raped  away  the  stately  graces  that  strolled 
upon  the  terraces. 

XII.— But  there  are  grounds  of  thrilling 
hope.  The  destruction  of  the  symbols  of  glory 
makes  way  for  what  is  glorious.  And  what, 
after  all,  is  glorious,  but  fearless,  free  spirits 
that  dare  everj^thing  for  love! 

Democracy  has  such  in  store.  They  will  come 
to  the  relief  of  the  saintless,  poetless  nations, 
before  all  the  islands  of  the  sea  are  tossed  to  the 
bargain  counter,  and  the  cities  are  wasted  with 
war. 

Out  of  democracy  shall  come  poets,  saints, 
artists,  world-lovers  of  an  unprecedented  kind. 
How  do  we  know?  They  will  come  because  it 
is  necessary. 

XIII.— The  world  has  had  enough  and  has 
come  to  the  end  of  that  blighting,  consumptive 
quality  of  democracy  which  has  gone  so  far  to 
make  the  world  seem  a  moral  wilderness,  arid 
and  flowerless  of  beauty.  Democracy  has  razed 
temples  and  palaces;  let  us  see  now  what  it 
can  build!  We  have  had  the  Nay  of  it;  we 
await  the  Yea.     It  has  advertised  the  things 

51 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

that  are  not  great;  its  pressing  engagement  now 
is  to  disclose  the  things  that  are.  It  has  set  its 
brand  on  pride  and  privilege,  the  boast  and 
pomp  of  rank  and  honor — marked  for  destruc- 
tion the  glory  of  this  world.  It  is  time  for  the 
revelation  of  the  greater  glory. 

We  have  had  the  law ;  we  expect  now  the 
gospel  of  democracy.  So  far  it  has  been  Mo- 
saic, prohibitive— its  message  mainly  a  "Thou 
shaltnot."  It  has  despised  old  shams,  but  it 
has  not  invented  new  valors.  It  has  put  down 
the  mighty,  but  it  has  not  made  the  commons 
royal.  It  has  withheld  its  trust  from  princes; 
but  it  has  not  known  where  else  to  put  its  trust. 

The  people  are  sick  of  negations ;  it  is  neces- 
sary that  the  poets  and  the  artists  should  come. 
The  world  has  lost  interest  in  the  discouraging 
theorem  that  one  man  is  no  better  than  another. 
Nor  does  it  find  satisfaction  in  the  rule  of  the 
majority.  There  is  no  advantage  in  being  bul- 
lied by  a  crowd.  The  democracy  of  blank  ne- 
gations is  played  out. 

XIV. — Yes,  let  us  confess  it  plainly,  if  de- 
mocracy contained  what  the  politicians  have 
Baid  that  it  contains,  and  nothing  more,  it  would 
be  an  entirely  hopeless  enterprise — the  climax  of 
unreason,  the  apotheosis  of  the  absurd,  the  con- 
da 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

summate  delusion  of  history,  the  destruction  of 
every  sweet  and  human  thing,  and  the  end  of 
the  world. 

Were  it  not  better  to  be  a  peasant  and  rever- 
ence a  lord,  than  be  a  politician  and  reverence 
nothing? 

Democracy,  regarded  as  a  balloting  contri- 
vance for  equating  the  hoof  and  claw  of  warring 
private  interests,  is  an  ingenious  futility.  Let 
it  pass  now  to  its  place  in  the  museums  of  an- 
tiquities along  with  the  devices  for  the  solution 
of  impossible  mechanical  problems,  like  that  of 
perpetual  motion. 

The  old  aristocratic  idea  had  more  blood  in  it 
than  that,  and  was  mure  nearly  a  real   and 
credible  thing.     A  lord,  a  peasant,  a  priest- 
good  enough,  if  only  the  lord  had  fed  the  peas- 
ant, and  the  priest  had  reverenced  his  soul ;  but 
since  the  peasant  fed  the  lord  and  had  to  him- 
self all  the  reverence  in  his  own  narrow,  glim- 
mering heart,  he  grew  and  lightened,  and  came 
to  be  at  length  himself  both  lord  and   priest! 
That  is  the  authexitic   biology  of  democracy. 
Democracy  is  born  out  of  the  abyss  of  the  infi- 
nite.    It  answers  to  the  longing  for  beauty,  the 
hunger  and  thirst  after  righteousness.     If  al- 
ways men  must  live  from  hand  to  mouth,  must 
dodge  and  calculate  and  gain  by  frugal  shifts, 

53 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

then  the  self-made  man  must  always  win,  and 
his  sordid  customs  must  be  set  up  for  good  as 
the  standard  of  the  soul.     But  if  it  should  turn 
out  that  a  common  man  may  have  access  to  the 
springs  of  beauty  and  the  eternal  health,  may 
look  out  upon  the  universal  landscape  from  a 
commanding  point  of  view  and  see  things  in 
their  proportions,  may  cease  to  have  mere  static 
relations   to    the  cosmos,   and   may  establish 
dynamic  and  vital  relations,  why,  then,  it  is  all 
over  with  tyrannies  and  vested  privileges.  Sta- 
tus must  give  way  to  the  dynamic  laws;  the 
arbitrary  must  yield  to  the  essential.     This  is 
scientific;  it  is  the  ultimatum  of  the  modern 
spirit.     In  the  presence  of  the  natural  facts  we 
are  not  interested  in  the  things  that  were  agreed 
upon.     Etiquette,  custom,  the  maxims  of  the 
wise  and    prudent,  tradition,  politics  and  the 
Revised  Statutes  —must  make  way  for  the  ele- 
niental  forces. 

The  social  constitution  becomes  a  pis  aller. 
Let  it  wear  for  a  week  and  then  we  shall  get  a 
better.  We  hold  the  civil  laws  lightly,  because 
we  perceive  that  they  are  only  approximate; 
we  shall  get  nearer  the  facts  by  and  by.  The 
beginning  of  democracy  is  the  discovery  that 
morality  is  not  an  appendix,  but  the  bulk  of  the 
volume  of  natural  philosophy— that  righteous- 

5A 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

ness  is  as  large  as  all  outdoors.  The  Magna 
Chart  a  of  democracy  is  the  revelation  of  the 
immediate  accessibility  of  God.  It  is  a  scandal 
to  the  ecclesiastics,  politicians  and  bookmen  be- 
cause it  makes  faith  the  mother  of  science,  and, 
in  the  scale  of  human  faculties,  gives  the  pri- 
macy not  to  the  intellect,  'but  to  the  will.  It 
refuses  to  stop  to  think  out  a  way  to  right  liv- 
ing, but  will  go  ahead  to  live  out  a  way  to  right 
thinking.  There  is  in  it  a  stored,  balked  and 
latent  energy  to  transform  the  world  in  a  year. 
Democracy  is  born  out  of  the  brooding  sense  of 
the  eternal;  it  takes  up  the  message  of  the 
timeless  Man  of  Nazareth ;  it  will  be  true  to  the 
great  evangel  of  Reformation  and  Renais- 
sance from  which  Church  and  State  have  apos- 
tatized ;  it  will  put  to  confusion  every  ecclesias- 
tic, dynastic  and  diplomatic  scheme,  and  bring 
the  nations  together  out-of-doors,  in  the  eternal 
open  air. 

XV. —The  new  century  opens  with  great  ex- 
pectancy. The  future  is  full  of  charm.  The 
past  is  past,  and  the  children  of  the  age  are 
glad.  There  stretches  before  them  an  alluring, 
radiant  vista,  though  the  dawn  dazzles  their 
eyes,  and  they  cannot  clearly  distinguish  even 
what  is  near.     No  matter;  they  are  not  afraid. 

6j 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

The  stupefying  spell  of  custom  has  been 
broken.  The  conspiracy  of  hebetude  has  been 
betrayed.  Ideas,  colossal,  magnificent,  are  in 
the  saddle,  and  are  sailing  the  sea  in  ships. 
There  is  thunder  in  the  air  and  azone. 

Oh!  democracy  of  dead  lift  and  suction,  de- 
mocracj^  of  pull  and  haul,  of  covetousness,  cau- 
tiousness and  cunning,  they  give  you  up  at  last. 
You  are  not  worth  while.  And  your  sapless 
platitudes,  your  sentimental  pieties  and  patriot- 
isms, they  spew  them  out! 

Allons!  A  new  democracy — yet  the  oldest 
— shall  renew  the  world;  a  democracy  that 
shall  not  exclude  foreigners  or  those  that  do 
not  speak  English ;  that  shall  take  the  earth  to 
be  its  colony  and  the  cosmic  laws  for  statutes 
and  ordinances.  The  Philippines,  the  Antilles 
and  all  the  other  islands  of  the  sea,  and  the  con- 
tinents, coast-lands  and  hinter-lands,  they  shall 
all  be  taken  in.  We  announce  the  dissolution 
of  the  old  7'egime  of  privilege,  exclusion  and 
monopoly,  and  we  proclaim  a  new  constitution 
according  to  the  essential  law. 


66 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


CHAPTER  IV. 

THE  DISCOVERY  OF  AMERICA. 

I. — This  land,  America,  shall  be  the  land  of 
the  incarnation.  On  this  ground  the  ideal  is  to 
come  to  terms  with  what  is  common  and  mat- 
ter-of-fact. Here,  on  a  grand  scale,  for  the  first 
time,  labor  shall  be  accepted  without  shame  and 
death  without  fear.  This  shall  be  the  country 
of  material  things,  the  land  of  the  universal 
sacrament.  We  perceive  that  God  does  noth- 
ing for  a  show,  or  to  prove  propositions,  or  just 
to  save  souls;  therefore  we  will  have  no  art 
for  the  sake  of  art,  we  will  not  be  governed 
by  preaching,  and  we  will  do  everything  for 
utility,  as  God  does.  This  shall  be  the  land  of 
commerce  and  manufacture;  the  land  of  money 
and  credit,  of  the  painters  of  pictures,  the 
writers  of  books,  and  the  carvers  of  statues  for 
utility  and  the  sweetening  of  the  earth.  We 
reject  Utopias  and  abstract  propositions.  We 
will  have  no  thinkers  that  do  not  dig,  and  no 
diggers  that  do  not  think. 

d7 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

America  shall  be,  we  hope,  the  land  of  the 
open  and  flowing  sea— the  land  of  ships,  of 
universal  exchange;  the  builder  of  roads 
through  the  remote  places,  and  of  interoceanic 
canals;  the  destroyer  of  political  boundaries. 

This  shall  be  the  land  of  change,  flux,  prog- 
ress; everything  must  flow.  We  will  have 
nothing  fixed  and  settled,  since  nothing  in  na- 
ture is  fixed  and  settled— not  the  ribs  of  the 
earth  nor  the  anatomy  of  a  man.  We  take  every- 
thing to  be  plastic,  and  we  do  not  think  that 
any  beautiful  thing  is  impossible.  We  expect 
the  miraculous  according  to  the  ordinary  run. 

This  shall  be  the  land  of  modernity  and  the 
present  day.  We  will  not  judge  this  day  by 
the  old  times,  but  we  will  judge  the  old  time 
from  this  eminence.  We  are  interested  to  hear 
of  anything  that  the  fathers  did  freely  and  un- 
precedentedly;  but  what  they  did  in  the  way 
of  habit  and  reflex  action  we  will  note  at  first 
hand  in  the  common  animals. 

We  know  that  this  day  has  lasted  from  the 
beginning,  and  will  last;  we  are  not  discon- 
certed by  sleep  or  the  sunsets ! '  We  will  regard 
everything  from  the  eternal  point  of  view. 

II.— The  grand  event  of  the  century  dawn 
shall  be  the  discovery  of  America.     America 

58 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

-—brooding  in  the  old  world  spell,  under  fog- 
banks  of  tradition  and  habit— at  last  shall  lift 
up  its  sunlit  Sierras  out  of  the  mist  and  stand 
revealed  to  Europe  and  to  itself. 

It  is  said  that  America  is  to  stand  forth  as  an 
equal  partner  among  what  are  called  the  Great 
Powers,  that  now  at  length  she  is  to  rise  to  the 
level  of  the  jealousy  and  fear  of  Europe,  and  to 
clutch  at  her  distributive  share  in  the  partition 
of  Asia,  Africa  and  the  islands;  that  she  is  to 
produce  statesmen  and  soldiers  on  the  European 
model,  and  generally  that  she  is  to  go  ahead  of 
what  is  going. 

We  do  not  think  that  America  is  to  be  re- 
vealed in  that  character.  We  do  not  believe 
that  the  mission  of  the  United  States  is  just  to 
do  better  than  its  competitors  the  things  that 
are  being  done.  We  look  for  new  enterprise, 
and    a    renaissance,  the  discovery  of  a  new 

world. 

It  is  childish  to  suppose  that  we  ever  have 
been,  or  could  be  separated  from  Europe.  The 
meaning  of  this  epoch  is  not  that  the  United 
States,  long  isolated,  is  now  at  length  to  make 
connection  with  the  transatlantic  world ;  nor  is 
it  that  America,  thralled  in  European  bond- 
age, is  now  at  length  to  break  away.  The 
meaning  of  the  epoch  is  the  transfer  of  the  moral 

59 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

hegemony  of  the  world  from  the  East  to  the 
West,  from  the  romantic,  earth-spurning,  tipsy 
morning  lands,  the  lands  of  prince  and  priest  and 
soldier,  of  castle-building  and  Babel  towers,  to 
the  lands  of  the  sobering  sunsets,  of  labor  and 
science  and  strong,  resurgent  youth — in  a  word, 
from  Aristocracy  to  Democracy. 

It  is  not  that  Europe  is  to  fade  away  and  be 
but  the  evening  shadows  of  the  Western  hills, 
nor  that  the  East  has  definitely  failed,  nor 
that  the  West  has  now  an  advantage.  It 
is  not  that  Americans  are  generally  good  and 
wise,  and  Europeans  bad  and  foolish.  But  this 
is  the  denouement  of  a  world-drama  in  which 
all  are  equally  concerned.  And  there  is  in  this 
tall,  rude,  prodigal  West,  a  youth  that  has  been 
in  the  wilderness,  and  has  slept  on  the  ground ; 
that  has  been  angered  and  has  not  been  unfor- 
giving; learned  humor  and  humility  and  grown 
strong  by  labor;  and  he  is  now  to  play  a  great 
role  of  faith  and  redemption  for  the  saving  of 
the  nations. 

III. — We  cannot  be  separated  from  the  rest. 
In  spite  of  tariffs,  the  illimitable  seas  and  all  the 
old  ethnic  jealousies  and  exclusions,  the  world 
has  all  things  common.  Whatever  happens  to 
one  man,  happens   to  everybody.     You  cannot 

60 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

take  your  tea  and  be  careless  of  the  coolies. 
You  would  have  to  settle  with  them  anyhow  in 
a  thousand  years.  You  must  settle  a  great 
deal  sooner  now,  considering  the  regularity  of 
the  mails  and  the  facilities  of  circulation. 

There  is  no  social  question  anywhere  that  is 
not  in  the  United  States.  There  is  no  sort  of 
tyranny,  profligacy,  or  hardness  of  heart  in  any 
other  country  that  is  not  here.  The  great  con- 
tradiction of  the  age  is  wrought  out  here  as  it 
is  in  Europe.  Here,  as  there,  the  old  order,  the 
regime  of  pride  and  privileges,  is  still  lofty- 
looking,  however  desperately  stricken  with 
years  and  however  fearsomely  arrayed  against 
the  invincible  standards  of  democracy. 

IV. — There  is  no  doubt  that  democracy — or 
something  that  goes  by  that  name — will  every- 
where prevail.  But  it  might  be  as  the  preva- 
lence of  hell  were  it  not  for  the  youth  and  faith 
in  the  heart  of  America. 

The  choice  lies  between  the  democracy  of 
envy  and  emeutes,  the  lust  for  a  dead  level, 
always  distractedly  sought  after,  but  never 
achievable  in  this  world,  and  making  all  things 
beautiful  forever  unachievable,  a  desperate  pen- 
dulum-swing between  triumphant  mercantilism 
and  fierce,  disruptive  intestine  wars;  the  choice 

ei 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

lies  between  this  and  the  parturition-pain  of  a 
new  and  unexampled  world-order,  a  democracy 
of  inner  and  sacramental  equality,  begotten  of 
the  modern  sense  of  the  eternal,  and  realizing 
itself  in  an  elation  of  labor  and  commerce,  in 
joyous,  creative  art,  in  wide-embracing   com- 
radeships, and  a  new  taste  in  living.    Expecta- 
tion and  the  preparation  for  this  event  are  every- 
where latent,  wistful,  passive ;  but  in  the  United 
States  is  the  active  principle  of  it,  the  genetic, 
begetting  power.     That  principle  and  power  is 
the  unconscious  embryonic  soul  of  America, 
which  now  is  brought  forth  in  the  shock  of 
war,  and  which  shall  come  to  know  itself  and 
understand    its    destination.      "What    but    the 
greatest  things  can  come  of  the  nation  that  has 
conceived  the  idea  of  the  sacredness  of  labor, 
and  that  has  sincerely  expected  prophets  from 
the  back-country,  and  salvation  out  of  Naza- 
reth !     This  inspiration  is  not  of  the  old  order  of 
things,  nor    by  any  means  to  be  conciliated 
therewith.     It  is  a  blast  of  destruction  for  the 
old  order,  and  a  breath  of  creation  for  the  new. 

V. — The  motive  of  the  old  regime^  the  spring 
of  its  energy,  the  explanation  of  what  we  have 
chosen  to  call  its  virtues  and  what  we  have 
chosen  to  call  its  vices,  is,  as  has  been  said,  the 

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The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

endeavor  to  escape  into  an  ideal  world.  The 
masters  of  the  old  regime,  the  admired  and  in- 
fluential men,  are  the  agents  and  examplars  of 
glory,  terrestrial  or  celestial— in  a  word,  the  sol- 
diers and  the  priests. 

The  energy  of  the  new  regime  arises  in  an 
opposite  quarter  and  runs  the  other  way,  so 
that  the  two  systems  are  at  utter  variance  and 
can  never  come  to  terms. 

The  power  of  the  new  order,  the  elan  of  the 
modern  spirit,  comes  of  taking  the  ideal  world 
for  granted  and  proceeding,  in  the  faith  of  it,  to 
the  conquest  of  the  real.  The  soldier  and  the 
priest  fall  back,  and  the  artist,  the  mechanic, 
and  the  man  of  business  become  the  masters  of 
society. 

The  historic  symbol  and  prophecy  of  this 
great  transaction—by  no  means  yet  fully  ac- 
complished, but  awaiting  fulfillment  in  the 
newly-discovered  West— is  that  epochal  mo- 
ment when  the  Middle  Ages  began  to  be  mod- 
ern with  the  decline  of  the  feudal  powers  and 
the  rise  of  the  free  cities  of  art  and  commerce. 
The  burghers  came  to  be  more  considerable 
than  knights  and  friars,  not  because  the  Cru- 
sades had  utterly  failed,  but  because  they  had 
not  utterly  failed ;  not  because  men  had  aban- 
doned the  desire  for  the  beautiful  and  settled 

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The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

down  to  be  sordid,  but  because  they  had  found 
and  fastened  upon  somewhat  of  the  beautiful, 
and  w^ere  determined  to  put  it  to  use — deter- 
mined to  make  the  cities  free.  It  was  a  great 
moment,  the  beginning  of  the  visible  prevalence 
of  the  modern  spirit.  The  gains  may  seem  to 
have  been  small  and  easily  lost;  but  they  were 
not  lost.  The  world  sometimes  moves  slowly, 
and  the  road  seems  long,  but  the  burghers  had 
set  out  hopefully  on  the  way  that  leads  from 
Nazareth  to  the  cosmopolitan  city  of  the  soul. 

Ever  since  the  rise  of  the  Italian  and  Han- 
seatic  commercial  towns  the  man  of  business  has 
gained  upon  the  politician  and  the  ecclesiastic, 
upon  the  soldier  and  the  priest.  Spite  of  all  his 
undeserving,  spite  of  usury,  luxury,  extortion 
and  monopol3%  spite  of  the  valor  of  soldiers 
and  the  love  of  saints,  he  has  gained.  He  has 
gained  because  he  is  in  the  way  of  tha  destiny  of 
the  world.  Up  to  this  time  the  man  of  business 
has,  to  speak  broadly,  done  his  best  to  miss  his 
opportunity ;  but  the  opportunity  remains.  Nay ! 
the  end  of  the  century  presents  to  him  an  occa- 
sion that  not  only  invites,  but  also  commands 
and  threatens.  Now  at  last  the  business  man 
must,  on  dreadful  pains  and  penalties,  get 
down  to  business — must  stop  his  ears  to  the 
brandishments  of  old  world  oracles,  and  com- 

64 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

mit  himself  fearlessly  to  the  new  world  mis- 
sion. The  trouble  has  been  that  the  man  of 
business  has  not  believed  in  his  calling;  he 
has  deferred  to  priests  and  soldiers;  he  has 
caught  the  contagion  of  the  dreams  of  glory- 
seekers.  His  mind  has  been  elsewhere  than  on 
his  work.  He  has  fed  the  hungry,  some  of 
them,  and  clothed  the  naked  abstractedly;  he 
has  tamed  fierce  wildernesses,  but  he  lias  not 
cared  for  the  people  that  should  inhabit  them; 
he  has  built  ships,  railroads,  Suez  canals,  in  an 
absent-minded  way,  thinking  of  other  things, 
of  money,  power,  politics,  social  esteem,  caste, 
colleges,  carriages.  We  have  net  yet  seen  a 
modern  man  of  business.  We  have  had  mer- 
chant princes  to  spare,  but  not  yet  a  prince  of 
merchants.  Perhaps,  after  all,  the  priest?  and 
soldiers  had  better  turn  traders  and  engineers, 
and  let  the  mooning  men  of  business,  for  a 
while,  tell  the  beads  and  wear  the  gilded  sashes. 

VI. — It  has  been  supposed  that  we  could 
first  settle  the  bread  question,  and  then  proceed 
to  finer  issues.  But  there  are  no  finer  issues — 
there  is  nothing  finer  than  common  bread,  un- 
less it  be  bread  of  a  finer  kind;  or  than  a  cup 
of  water,  unless  it  be  a  cup  of  wine.  The  pal- 
pable, real  world  is  unfathomable,  mysterious, 

65 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

spiritual,  and  there  is  room  in  it  for  the  most 
magnificent  adventure  of  the  ideal.  It  is  not 
necessary  to  go  apart  from  it  in  order  to  think 
or  to  aspire;  the  dignity  of  thinking  is  in  labor, 
and  the  dignity  of  labor  in  thinking.  The 
sphere  of  economics  is  without  bounds;  it  takes 
in  all  the  fine  arts  and  the  unnamed  fimer  arts, 
and  there  is  no  magnanimity  or  love  that  cannot 
be  expressed  somehow  in  terms  of  bread  and 
wine. 

It  is  common  to  speak  of  the  laws  of  nature, 
of  chemistry,  biology,  and  so  on,  as  if  they 
were  distinguishable  from  the  essential  moral 
laws.  But  they  are  not  local  shifts ;  they  are  not 
other  than  the  essential,  moral  laws,  and  there 
is  no  natural  law  or  section,  or  sub-title  of  a  law 
that  does  not  exist  for  the  sake  of  the  liberty  of 
the  soul.  The  question  of  food  and  clothes  is 
inextricably  bound  up  with  the  interests  of  art 
and  letters,  and  all  together  are  meshed  and 
woven  in  with  the  grand,  eternal  issues,  so  that 
we  cannot  make  an  inch  of  progress  in  the  set- 
tlement of  economic  questions  save  as  we  make 
progress  in  the  settlement  of  the  other  ques- 
tions. 

We  have  had  a  theory  in  America  that  we 
could  first  lay  a  solid  foundation  of  economic 
prosperity,  that  we  could  proceed  then  to  litera- 
te 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

ture  and  art  galleries,  and  finish  up  with  cathe- 
drals and  religion.  The  religious  specialists 
will  tell  us  that  all  this  is  exactly  preposterous; 
that  the  progression  must  begin  at  the  other 
end,  and  run  in  the  other  direction.  But  these 
nice  discussions  are  out  of  date.  The  day 
dawns  for  the  lovers,  and  the  men  of  action, 
who  have  souls  to  their  bodies,  and  bodies  to 
their  souls,  and  are  not  too  curious  about  the 
distinction. 

VII. — Not  without  travail  the  new  nation  is 
born.  In  vast  transportations  over  seas,  in  hot, 
malarial  campaigns,  in  Malaysian  and  West 
Indian  jungles,  in  battles  not  all  a  holiday  and 
gay  in  victories,  America  breaks  through  its 
integumentary  barriers  of  protective  tariffs, 
immigration  acts,  passe  presidential  doctrines, 
hypocritical  neutralities,  and  wins  out  into  the 
wind-swept  highways  of  the  world.  Through 
the  swinging  Janus  gates  the  youth  and  faith 
of  America  go  forth  as  not  knowing  whither, 
yet  going  East  and  West,  following  the  equa- 
tor and  the  tropics,  until  they  shall  somehow 
meet  and  girdle  the  earth  and  embrace  it.  Once 
more,  after  four  hundred  years,  the  galleons  of 
Spain  have  sailed  West,  and  discovered  a 
world  I 

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The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

VIIL— Universality,  nnanimityl  America 
shall  be  the  crossroads  of  the  world.  The  na- 
tions shall  flow  into  it,  and  pass  through  it. 
We  renounce  old  habits.  We  have  no  patent 
on  democracy;  we  will  not  make  the  abolition 
of  privilege  itself  a  privilege. 

We  will  make  here  a  clearance  of  every  law- 
made  privilege  and  monopoly,  and  we  will 
make  it  intolerably  hard  for  other  countries  to 
maintain  privileges  and  monopolies.  There 
shall  be  newspapers  at  length  and  universities, 
and  there  shall  be  ideas  that  march.  We  know 
that  we  cannot  win  liberty  or  justice  for  one 
country  without  winning  it  for  all  countries; 
that  to  lift  one  is  to  lift  all,  that  the  load  is  an 
Atlas- load.  But  the  shoulders  of  democracy  are 

broad. 

Bonaparte  announced  at  the  beginning  of  the 
century  la  carriere  %erte  aux  talents.  What 
he  meant  was  a  free  course  for  men  of  brains. 
The  men  of  brains  have  had  their  day,  and  we 
see  what  they  have  done  for  us.  America  offers 
at  the  end  of  the  century  a  career  for  men  of 
faith. 

The  invitation  is  not  for  those  that  would 
like  in  the  intervals  of  other  business  to  do  what 
is  called  a  little  good,  but  for  those  that  love 
the  risks  of  faith  and  the  di-ine  adventure,  that 

68 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

know  the  release  and  expansion  of  a  lover,  and 
can  lose  themselves  in  their  enterprise,  and  live 
hard  and  like  it.  For  such  there  is  a  clear  vo- 
cation and  a  career.  It  is  no  smooth  boulevard, 
no  lounger's  promenade:  it  is  a  rugged,  narrow 
path  through  the  world  chaos;  but  it  is  a  high- 
way of  great  discovery. 


69 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE  DISCOUNT  OF  GLORY. 

I. — In  the  harbor  of  Manila,  at  Santiago  de 
Cuba,  and  elsewhere,  the  guns  of  the  old  re- 
gime slacken  their  fire  and  are  silenced.  In  the 
way  of  powder,  steel  and  fighting  machines, 
the  old  order  has  not  now  any  great  hope.  War 
becomes  a  kind  of  inverted  manufacture,  a 
grim,  terrific  commerce.  The  Soldier  and  the 
Priest  have  no  longer  a  chance  in  this  pursuit 
against  the  Mechanic  and  the  Man-of-business. 
It  is  demonstrated  that  a  democracy  a  little  faith- 
ful to  its  charter  of  humility  would  be  invinci- 
ble against  the  pompous  armaments  of  the 
world.  The  meekness  of  mechanics  shall  make 
the  Powers  powerless.  Bulk  is  nothing;  but 
to  know  how  things  go  in  this  God's  world  is 
something.  To  be  en  rapport  with  the  universe, 
to  have  the  feel  of  it  in  your  bones  and  the  law 
of  it  leaping  in  your  blood — that  is  everything 
in  modern  war. 

Ten  thousand  men  with  cosmic  justice  in 

70 


tk^- 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

them,  the  divine  entente  with  Nature's  soul, 
could  put  the  whole  big,  blustering  world  to 
ignominious  rout. 

They  could  do  it;  but  they  would  not.  For 
this  cosmic  justice,  this  miracle  behind  me- 
chanics, is  magnanimity  and  love.  The  meek- 
ness that  is  might  is  also  mercy.  And  when 
winning  comes  to  be  too  easy  and  too  safe,  it 
will  cease  to  seem  so  glorious.  A  few  more 
victories  like  i^at  of  Dewey  and  Sampson,  and 
Victory  herself  will  be  smitten  with  a  kind  of 
shame,  and  will  appoint  days  of  fasting  in  love 
and  pity  for  her  enemies. 

II. —America  is  strong  and  can  win  battles 
because  of  its  labor  and  its  earth-grip;  because 
of  its  mechanics  that  can  build  a  ship  or  punctu- 
ally sink  one  with  simple  and  loving  devotion, 
but  it  is  not  invincible;  it  is  weak  because  of  its 
sentimental  abstractions,  its  longing  for  privi- 
leges and  glory,  its  passion  for  prize  money. 
The  enemy  was  weak  in  ships;  but  his  death- 
clutch  held  us  close,  and  he  is  strong  in  viru- 
lent contagion.  Rome  revenged  herself  on  her 
conquerors  by  corrupting  them,  and  so  Spain, 
too,  may  get  revenge— may  infect  us  with  the 
full  fire  and  venom  of  the  old-world  glory  dis- 
ease. 

71 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

It  was  a  dramatic  thing — so  subtle  and  sure 
is  the  inner  logic  of  history — this  wrestle  on 
the  threshold  of  the  new  era,  of  the  young  giant 
of  democracy  with  the  choicest  champion  and 
Paladin  of  the  ancient  regime.  Spain,  the  classic 
land  of  the  soldier  and  the  priest,  ultra-undem- 
ocratic Spain,  the  country  that  least  believes  in 
the  intrinsic  justice  and  reasonableness  of  the 
real  world,  and  most  believes  in  things-agreed- 
upon,  in  honor,  orthodoxy,  and  authority — 
Spain,  the  arch-agent  and  exemplar  of  the  great 
political  and  ecclesiastical  superstition,  was 
well  matched  in  mortal  combat  with  the  demo- 
cratic land. 

It  is  a  conflict  the  issues  of  which  are  to  be 
lifted  up  and  graven  high ;  but  the  firing  of 
guns  was  incidental.  The  allies  of  Spain  are 
not  mostly  Spaniards.  Everywhere  through  the 
Rockies  and  the  Alleghenies,  by  the  Missis- 
sippi, the  Hudson  and  the  Potomac,  the  soil  of 
democracy  teems  with  a  kind  of  treason,  albeit 
a  kind  that  is  not  a  crime  in  law.  It  fills  the 
newspapers  and  magazines,  and  Ferdinand  and 
St.  Ignatius  Loyola  from  congenial  constituen- 
cies have  got  themselves  sent  to  congress.  No 
man  can  say  to  another :  you  are  a  spy,  because 
in  every  man,  the  accuser  as  well  as  the  ac- 
cused, there  is  a  conspirator  against  the  sover- 

72 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

eignty  of  the  outdoors  God,  a  prebendary  of 
the  old  regime  pleading  for  honors  and  privi- 
leges, for  Pope-holy  pieties  and  patriotisms, 
against  the  liberal,  open-air  view  of  things, 
which  is  democracy. 

III. — The  thing  that  has  been  most  steadily 
desired  since  the  world  began  is  not  money,  or 
long  life,  or  pleasant  pastimes,  but  a  guaranteed 
god — a  god  with  solid,  institutional  backing, 
advertising  himself  in  distinct  terms,  and 
plainly  discriminating  between  deserving  per- 
sons and  nations,  and  the  undeserving. 

Disappointments  have  been  heaped  up  from 
age  to  age ;  but  every  turn  of  the  world  has 
found  the  people  newly  disposed  to  believe  that 
God  has  established  himself  at  last  and  settled 
down  in  some  high  political,  scholastic,  or  ec- 
clesiastical seat,  so  that  the  divine  judgment  on 
human  conduct  can  be  obviously  and  immedi- 
ately translated  into  brands  of  infamy  and  med- 
als of  honor. 

It  is  this  longing  for  an  unquestionably  re- 
spectable and  plain-spoken  God  that  has  been 
the  stronghold  of  all  the  monarchies,  aristoc- 
racies and  ecclesiocracies  of  the  world.  The 
privileged  classes  have  kept  their  privileges 
and  have  ruled  the  people  not  only  or  chiefly 

73 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

on  acconnt  of  their  superior  wisdom  and 
strength,  but  because  they  have  been  supposed 
to  be  the  special  backers  and  spokesmen  of  God. 
Their  ribbons,  and  title-givings,  their  blessings 
and  anointings  have  seemed  to  be  veritable 
means  of  grace  and  bestowments  of  spiritual 
pov^er,  because  it  has  been  supposed  that  the 
givers  were  the  depositaries  of  peculiar  and  in- 
communicable divine  revelations;  that  they 
stood  nearer  God  than  the  people  did,  and 
nearer  than  the  people  could.  Back  of  every 
social  organization  under  the  old  regime  is 
some  kind  of  supposed  guaranteed  revelation  of 
God,  some  form  of  denial  of  the  fundamental 
democratic  doctrine  of  the  utter  commonness  of 
revelation.  The  modern  spirit  is  in  these  days 
lifting  up  its  voice  to  bear  witness  against  every 
pretension  of  those  that  claim  a  right  to  speak 
conclusively  for  God.  Democracy  cannot  come 
to  anj'  kind  of  terms  with  specially  guaranteed 
revelations.  For  such  things,  whether  inter- 
preted by  priests  and  princes,  or  by  scribes  and 
doctors,  mean  the  establishment  of  authority 
outside  the  conscience  of  the  people — mean,  in  a 
word,  the  negation  of  self-government. 

IV. — Infinitely  pathetic  and  man-endearing 
is   the  heartbreak    of  the  hundred   ages,  this 

74 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

alienation  of  the  old  world  from  the  God  of  the 
open  air.  One  would  think  that  sometimes,  in 
moments  like  this,  when  the  strain  is  great,  God 
would  long  to  break  the  interminable  silence 
and  tell  us  plainly,  in  some  prodigious  and  un- 
deniable way,  that  this  is  the  soul's  world,  and 
that  we  need  not  be  afraid.  Doubtless  he  does 
so  long,  and  his  withholding  is  a  continual 
passion. 

Certainl.y  the  righteousness,  the  moral  sym- 
pathy, of  the  universe  does  not  impose  itself 
upon  us— it  is  not  undeniable.  We  are  left  free 
to  believe  that  the  whole  scheme  is  bad  or  un- 
feeling, and  that  the  God  of  it  is  not  our  God. 
There  is  a  silence  in  it  that  seems  like  indiffer- 
ence, and  a  hardness  that  seems  like  wicked- 
ness, and  contradictions  that  look  unreason- 
able. For  thousands  of  years  we  have  stood  off 
at  a  distance,  lynx-eyed,  inquisitive,  suspicious, 
and  tried  to  construe  it  to  the  understanding  to 
see  it  steady  and  whole  in  logical  perspective; 
but  nobody  has  yet  succeeded  in  doing  that. 
There  is  always  an  unassimilable  remainder, 
a  surd.  It  is  oefr  always  possible  to  turn  away 
and  say:  *'I  do  not  find  myself  here.  I  will 
get  my  living  out  of  this,  since  I  must;  but  I 
will  live  in  another,  an  ideal  world."  So  thick 
are  the  veils,  so   patiently  does  God  hide  his 

76 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

face,  that  men  may  believe  without  compulsion, 
may  achieve  original  love  and  be  free. 

It  is  a  part  of  the  ground  plan  of  the  world 
that  it  should  be  always  possible  to  doubt  the 
safety  of  doing  what  is  beautiful  and  right, 
possible  to  doubt  whether  the  ultimate  authori- 
ties of  the  universe  would  back  one  up  in  that 
kind  of  enterprise.  It  seems  that  tonic,  drastic 
doubt  is  forever  necessary  in  order  that  beauty 
and  right  should  grow  indigenous  in  man.  The 
measure  of  the  beautifulness  in  a  man  is  the 
amount  of  ugliness  that  he  can  meet  without 
despairing,  and  the  dignity  of  the  stature  of  his 
faith  is  in  proportion  to  the  clearness  and  san- 
ity with  which  he  doubts.  The  man  of  the 
modern  spirit  is  a  mighty  doubter;  and  the 
depth  of  his  Gethsemane  measures  the  height 
of  his  Golgotha. 

The  death  of  religion  is  in  a  dead  certainty.  \ 
Perhaps  God  would  sooner  destroy  all  the  Bi- 
bles of  the  nations  and  efface  all  the  miracles 
of   faith,  than  remove  the  possibility  of  that 
spirit-stirring  doubt. 

V. — It  is  not  that  God  has  filled  the  earth 
with  little  traps  to  catch  us  and  perplex  us. 
The  question  of  faith  is  not  a  matter  of  the  pre- 
ponderance of  evidence — beak  and  claws  on  one 

76 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

side,  rosebuds  and  summer  on  the  other.  It  is 
perceived  that  since  all  things  hang  together, 
one  thing  must  be  as  good  as  another,  and  no 
better.  The  doubt  spreads  over  all  and  takes 
in  everything. 

Looked  at  in  the  way  of  this  all-comprehend- 
ing doubt,  the  world  seems  \o  the  moral  sense 
a  desert  swept  clean  by  the  wind  of  every  foot- 
print of  divinity;  there  are  no  exceptional  phe- 
nomena, no  oases;  all  is  sapless,  siccate,  bare. 
There  is  no  meaning  in  the  patient  valor  of 
Jesus,  the  suffering   of  the  poor,  the  ineffable 
charm    of    womanliness    and    manliness,    the 
great  poems  and  pictures,  the  grand  rituals  of 
worship;  there  is  left  only  the  opportunity  to 
improve  one's  own  mind  and   better  one's  con- 
dition.    Yea,  the  last  marvel  of  nature  and  its 
furthest  reach  toward  the  infinite  is  just  a  cu- 
rious, selective  mind  whereby  you  may  accel- 
lerate  the  process  of  your  making.     You  are 
the  choicest,  quintessent  creature! 

From  all  this  the  soul  of  a  man  turns  away 
in  bitterness.  If  he  is  nothing  but  the  Finest 
Thing  Made,  then  it  is  all  over  with  religion 
and  great  art,  and  it  is  all  over  with  magna- 
nimity and  valor. 

YL — You  may  choose  to  look  at  things  so  if 

77 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

you  will ;  or  if  you  will  the  world  may  roll  out 
its  landscape  in  another  light.  You  find  in 
yourself  a  witness  that  you  are  not  altogether 
made  but  are  also  maker.  This  seems  a 
voucher  of  eternity.  You  see  yourself  not  as 
the  last  term  in  a  process  of  development,  but 
the  first  term.  You  date  back  of  Abraham, 
back  also  of  the  amoeba.  You  rise  up  from 
your  passivity;  you  cease  to  wish  and  begin  to 
will.  You  claim  a  share  in  the  business  and 
passion  of  creation.  This  is  faith ;  it  is  also  the 
principal  of  democracy.  It  is  the  assertion,  in 
spite  of  doubt,  that  the  sovereignty  of  God  is 
in  some  real  sense  within  yourself,  and  so  in 
conflict  with  the  disorder  and  brutality  of  the 
world  you  are  like  a  king  contending  for  your 
own  kingdom.  You  back  up  against  the  im- 
pregnable eternities,  and  are  ready  to  die  a 
thousand  deaths  for  what  to  the  soul  seems 
sweet  and  just. 

VII.— Always  this  antithesis  of  doubt  and 
faith  has,  in  terms  more  or  less  distinct,  been 
presented  to  the  souls  of  men ;  and  the  antithe- 
sis will  doubtless  stand. 

After  thousands  of  years  of  investigating  and 
philosophizing  the  sat;anfs  have  at  last  in  these 
latter  days  got  the  case  approximately  stated 

78 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

— which  is  a  gain;  perhaps  the  greatest  gain  of 
the  century.  But  the  men  of  action  and  the 
mass  of  the  people  were  a  long  way  in  advance 
of  them  in  the  discovery  of  the  fact — the  fact 
that  the  antithesis  exists,  and  that  it  is  unescap- 
able  and  irreducible. 

The  discovery  of  this  inexpugnable  doubt  is 
the  negative  power  of  the  modern  spirit. 
Herein  at  last  is  one  thing  logically  settled — to 
wit,  that  the  final  issue  of  life  is  not  capable  of 
logical  settlement  must  be  allowed  to  remain, 
so  far  as  mere  intellect  goes,  an  open  question. 
There  is  no  blackboard  demonstration  that  God 
is  good;  you  must  risk  it,  or  die  a  coward.  -. 
There  is  no  earttry  help  for  you;  you  cannot  i 
shift  the  responsibility.  There  is  no  insurance 
society  that  can  guarantee  you  against  loss; 
there  is  no  prize-money  promise  of  the  ruling 
powers  that  the  general  government  of  the 
world  may  not  at  last,  after  all,  repudiate. 

No  extant  person,  natural,  legal  or  mystical, 
is  qualified  to  assume  your  soul.  God  has  de- 
cided to  withhold  himself,  and  has  appointed 
no  agents  with  power  of  attorney.  The  corpo- 
rations that  pretend  to  the  function  of  bless- 
ing and  cursing,  rewarding  and  punishing,  are 
not  authentic.  The  authority  of  the  Church 
becomes  a  fading  specter  and  the  sovereignty  of 

79 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

the  State  a  legal  fiction.  There  is  only  one 
sovereignty,  and  its  exterritoriality  is,  for  this 
day,  in  your  own  body.  You  are  to  make  your 
report,  not  to  the  majority,  or  to  the  ordained 
and  the  anointed,  but  to  that. 

God  withholds  himself,  and  there  is  on  this 
earth  no  sure  fountain  of  salvation  or  honor. 
The  Church  can  excommunicate,  but  it  cannot 
effectually  exclude;  the  State  can  crucify,  but 
it  cannot  convict.  There  are  instituted  powers, 
but  there  are  no  instituted  authorities.  One 
may  be  hanged,  drawn  and  quartered,  perhaps 
with  good  desert;  but  he  cannot,  here,  be 
judged. 

The  Judge  and  Rewarder  has  not  in  Church 
or  State,  or  anywhere  save  in  conscience  and 
the  common,  cosmic  law,  set  up  here  His  court. 

VIII. — These  things  follow  from  the  discov- 
ery of  the  invincible  doubt;  the  discovery  that 
the  final  issue  is  deep  down  in  the  core  of  con- 
sciousness, where  the  everlasting  yea  and  nay 
are  met,  that  the  final  question  cannot  be  re- 
solved by  the  understanding,  but  must  be  en- 
countered, and  somehow  practically  determined 
by  the  will.  This  discovery  is  a  cardinal  reve- 
lation, because  it  clears  the  road  for  faith. 
Faith  could  never  have  been  in  this  world  if 

80 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

the  scribes  and  doctors  had  had  their  cock-suro 
way.  It  would  have  been  impossible  for  the 
people  to  trust  in  God  if  the  authorities  had 
not  been  first  discredited.  If  it  had  been  per- 
fectly certain  that  the  overwhelming  presence 
of  God  was  at  Mt.  Sinai,  there  would  have 
been  place  for  fidelity  and  endless  deference,  but 
not  of  faith.  Moses  himself  was  not  quite  sure, 
else  he  would  not  so  command  our  reverence. 
And  all  along  the  old  heathen  and  Hebrew 
ways  in  the  dust  of  the  unremembered  throng 
that  were  convinced  of  Moses'  law  or  Mo- 
loch's, are  the  vestiges  of  loving  and  valiant 
souls  that  were  not  quite  sure  of  the  oracle,  and 
were  fain  to  trust  in  God. 

IX.— It  is  the  distinction  of  the  Jews,  that 
they  were  from  of  old  comparatively  modern. 
Might  not  one  say  that  modernity  itself  is  of  the 
Jews?  They  were  the  best  doubters  in  an- 
tiquity, and  accordingly  had  most  of  faith. 
Less  than  their  neighbors  did  they  concern 
themselves  with  what  is  called  the  future  life, 
and  they  looked  not  for  rewards  and  penalties 
from  thence.  The  insoluble  questions  they  were 
content  to  leave  insoluble.  They  did  not  expect 
ealvation  or  honor  from  an  institution.  Their 
immortal  glory  is  that  they  did  not  thirst  for 

81 


c:>,. 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

glory;  and  they  were  the  only  first-class  power 
of  the  ancient  world  that  did  not  found  an 
empire.  They  were  of  all  the  least  sentiment- 
al, and  had  the  least  of  superstition.  Even  to 
this  da5%  when  modernity  itself  seems  waver- 
ing, and  in  religion  and  politics,  in  art  and  let- 
ters, is  meditating  a  retreat  to  Medisevalism, 
or  further  back,  the  Jews  go  bravely  on  their 
mission,  freest  of  the  taint  of  morbid  ideality 
and  most  exposed  to  the  fury  of  enthusiastic 
wrong. 

The  genius  of  the  Jews  is  of  the  concrete 
only.  There  is  in  it  a  sterling  realism,  a  manly, 
quick  settlement  of  accounts.  Their  world- 
mission  has  been  to  witness  for  the  intrinsical- 
ity,  the  self-sufficiency  of  right,  against  every 
sort  of  spiritual  dodge  and  shift,  and  deus  ex 
machina. 

The  Jewish  Scriptures  are  shot  through  from 
beginning  to  end  with  this  idea.  It  is  the  prin- 
ciple that  grips  the  Old  Testament  with  the 
New,  and  co-ordinates  their  seeming  contradic- 
tions. Right,  in  the  Bible,  is  never  a  bitter 
thing,  which,  if  you  will  take  you  shall  have 
sweet  things  for  bonus.  The  right  of  the  Jew- 
ish Scriptures  is  always  sweet  and  desirable, 
and  proves  itself  as  it  goes.  In  the  Old  Testa- 
ment are  manna,  milk  and  honey,  purple  and 

82 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

fine  lineo,  flock?  and  herds  and  length  of  days 
in  the  New  Testament  there  are  other  and  dif- 
ferent things  that  it  takes  more  of  a  man  to 
come  up  with ;  but  there  is  never  anywhere  a 
suspended  payment  or  a  getting  ahead  of  God, 
no  works  of  supererogation,  no  meritorious  serv- 
ices, no  honors  or  titles,  no  ribbons  or  medals, 
no  extraneous  glory,  no  prize  money.  One 
plants  and  digs  and  gets  corn  and  wine,  but  not 
testimonials  or  promotions.  The  blessings  and 
cursings  do  not  count  against  the  law ;  every- 
thing goes  to  its  own  place. 

The  faith  of  the  Bible  is  not  a  conviction 
about  God,  a  conclusion  stubbornly  stuck  to, 
or  dictated  by  authority.  It  is  not  a  convic- 
tion at  all;  it  is  a  willingness,  a  resolution  to 
take  risk  that  this  world  really  is  at  bottom 
what  it  ought  to  be,  and  that  it  can  in  its  very 
nature  fulfill  the  heart's  longing.  Jesus  spoke 
with  authority  to  the  Jews,  precisely  because 
he  spoke  from  this  ground  of  the  intrinsic  and 
elemental,  and  did  not  speak  as  the  authorities 
did.  It  would  have  been  different  in  the  Fu- 
(/l^  rum  or. Areopagus  among  the  worshipers  of 
an  emperor  or  the  partisans  of  philosophers. 
There  were  more  Pharisees  in  Rome  or  in  Ath- 
ens than  there  were  in  Jerusalem,  more  men 
with  an   obsession,  more  victims  of  an  ideal. 

^3 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

The  excellence  of  the  Jews  was  their  superior 
sanity  and  earth-titness.  It  was  by  no  accident 
that  the  typical  modern  man  was  born  a  Jew, 
and  that  he  spoke  not  to  the  people  whose  inspi- 
rations were  the  exquisite,  wistful  imagining 
of  Homer  or  Virgil,  but  to  those  whose  poems 
were  full  of  labor  and  migrations  and  patient 
waiting,  of  the  laying  out  of  the  land,  the  rear- 
ing of  children,  and  the  acquisition  of  flocks 
and  herds.  The  great  men  of  Jewish  literature 
were  neither  priests  nor  soldiers,  but  economists 
and  men  of  affairs — Abraham,  Isaac  and  Ja- 
cob. And  these  were  admired  not  for  their 
performances — their  fame  abashed  nobody — but 
for  their  method,  their  faith  which  was  under- 
stood to  be  equally  available  for  all.  Thus  caste 
was  excluded  with  the  sentimentalities  of  hero 
worship  and  the  blind  devotions  of  royalty. 
Men  were  put  in  possession  of  themselves,  and 
the  way  was  cleared  for  the  evangel  of  modern 
democracy. 

The  Jewish  people  were  the  religious  people 
par  excellence,  simply  because  they  did  not 
make  religion  a  specialty,  and  did  not  occupy 
themselves  with  vain  questions  concerning  the 
immortality  of  the  soul.  The  progress  of  relig- 
ion throughout  the  ages  has  consisted  in  with- 
drawing men's  minds  from  another  world  to 

84 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

this;  it  is  the  passing  of  the  hope  of  immortal- 
ity into  the  present  sense  of  eternity. 

Materialism  is  the  raw  material  of  religion. 
In  all  times  the  enemy  of  faith  has  been,  not 
carnality  and  world liness,  but  a  strained  and 
distempered  ideality — a  longing  for  a  mystical 
or  artificial  world-order  whose  law  should  be 
other  than  the  law  of  the  present  world— a 
pruriency  of  ecclesiastic  or  imperialistic  ambi- 
tion. The  defenders  of  the  faith  have  made  it 
hard  to  believe  in  God ;  and  the  champions  of 
an  imperial  order  have  cast  us  into  a  wilderness 
of  politics.  The  cruelest  men  have  been  the 
makers  of  empires,  as  Napoleon  and  Philip  II. 

of  Spain  —  excepting  only  the  makers  of 
churches,  as  Torquemada  and  Calvin.  God 
will  have  sons.'  And  the  twentieth  century 
belongs  neither  to  the  priests  nor  to  the  poli- 
ticians. 

X. — The  mission  of  democracy  is  to  put  down 
the  rule  of  the  mob.  In  monarchies  and  aris 
tocracies  it  is  the  mob  that  rules.  It  is  puer- 
ile to  suppose  that  kingdoms  are  made  by 
kings.  The  king  would  do  nothing  if  the  mob 
did  not  throw  up  its  cap  when  the  king  rides 
by.  The  king  is  consented  to  by  the  mob 
because  of  that  in  him  which  is  mob-like.    The 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

mob  loves  glory  and  prizes;  so  does  the  king. 
If  he  loved  beauty  and  justice,  the  mob  would 
shout  for  him  while  the  fine  words  were  sound- 
ing in  the  air ;  but  he  could  never  celebrate  a 
jubilee  or  establish  a  dynasty.  When  the 
crowd  gets  ready  to  demand  justice  and  beauty, 
it  becomes  a   democracy  and  has   done  with 

kings. 

The  crowd  is  protoplasmic;  it  is  the  raw  ma- 
terial of  humanity.     It  is  in  process  of  being 
made;  it  has  not  yet  acquired  status  as  maker. 
It  is  passive  and  yields  to  every  suggestion. 
It  wishes,  but  hardly  wills.    For  the  most  part, 
indeed,  it  follows  the  suggestions  of  nature  and 
the    immanent  God.     It    performs  marvelous 
feats  of  wisdom  and  devotion,  because  of  its 
utter  receptivity.     It  makes  languages,  invents 
v7orils  whose  insight  surpasses  all  philosophy, 
suffers  prodigies  of  toil  and  fights  great  bat- 
tles.   But  it  is  capable  also  of  every  infamy  and 
atrocity  if  conjured  thereto  in  the  name  of  pa- 
triotism, liberty,  or    any    other   woU-sounding 

word. 

The  crowd,  touched  with  morbid  ideality,  be- 
comes the  mob.  A  mob  is  the  crowd  corrupted 
by  Tinrealizable  abstractions.  The  September 
massacres  in  Paris  and  St.  Bartholomew's  day 
are  corollaries  of  the  divine  right  of  kings  and 

86 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

priests.  A  slum  is  the  reflection— io  a  puddle 
—of  the  dilettanteism  of  drawing  rooms  and 
the  cant  of  sectarian  churches ;  as  a  museum 
of  horrors  is  of  like  inspiration  with  a  charity 
ball.    Both  make  a  pomp  of  misery  and  shame. 

XI. — Psychologically  speaking,  it  is  the 
definition  of  the  old  regime  that  therein  the 
practical  understanding  which  proceeds  from 
the  will  is  subordinated  to  the  faculty  of  pass- 
ive thinking— call  it  intuition,  cognition,  reflec- 
tion, abstraction,  pure  reason,  as  you  like— 
which  proceeds  from  the  emotions,  from  that  in 
a  man  wherein  he  is  moved,  but  is  not  a 
mover.  The  strife  of  the  ages  is  to  get  this 
order  reversed,  to  master  the  thinking  that  re- 
flects by  the  thinking  that  grapples  with  things 
and  creates— the  thinking  that  conceives  ideals, 
by  the  thinking  that  achieves  them. 

The  loftiest  thing  in  a  man  is  not  his  pure 
reason;  it  is  in  this  that  he  draws  nearest 
to  the  primal,  passive,  dream  state  of  the  un- 
differentiated crowd,  and  to  the  mind  and 
instinct  of  animals.  A  man  is  a  man  not  be- 
cause his  mind  reflects  the  world  with  ideal 
variations;  the  mind  of  a  dog  does  that.  He 
growls  in  his  dreams  to  prove  himself  capable 
of  abstract    and    conceptual    thinking.     And 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

every  donkey  is  a  master  of  inductive  science 
and  argues  of  carrots  in  general  from  particular 
carrots.  A  man  is  a  man  not  because  of  his  per- 
cepts or  his  concepts,  but  because  he  under- 
stands the  world  somewhat,  believes  in  it,  and 
will  improve  it. 

To  this  general  issue  runs  the  monumental 
demonstration  of  Immanuel  Kant,  that  unwit- 
ting expounder  of  revolutionary,  democratic 
dialectic,  the  Copernicus  of  social  philosophy, 
who,  walking  his  prim,  punctual  way  in  his 
Konigsberg  garden  has  set  the  world  a-spin- 
ning  and  turned  things  upside  down.  Civiliza- 
tion waits  for  the  practical  understanding  to 
answer  back  and  corroborate  the  reason  and  to 
fulfill  the  heart's  desire.  It  is  the  response  of 
the  Son  of  God  to  the  summons  of  the  Father. 
From  this  proceed  all  proper  human  enterprise 
and  wisdom.  It  is  the  essential  human  mind. 
The  wa}^  of  intellect  is  in  labor  and  self-denial, 
the  striving  energy  of  creation.  The  typical 
act  of  intellect  is  an  act  of  justice  or  the  fash- 
ioning of  a  thing  that  is  beautiful;  and  its  ax- 
iom is  the  plasticity  of  all  materials  to  what  is 
best. 

XII. — But  the  old  regime — the  regime  of  re- 
flection, tradition,  culture — is  at  the  mercy  of 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

the  mob  because  its  axiom  is  that  things  are  in- 
evitably what  they  are;  and  it  has  nothing  to 
offer  to  the  god -thirst  of  the  people  but  a  swoon 
or  a  glory  charm.  The  sway  of  '  'pure  reason"  is^ 
free  swing  for  fanaticism  and  every  fine  frenzy.  ^^ 
It  is  also  the  condition  of  solid,  established  tyr- 
anny, and  the  supremacy  of  dogma.  It  makes 
smooth  the  way  for  the  strut  of  the  pedant,  the 
superciliousness  of  science  for  its  own  sake,  and 
art  for  the  sake  of  art.  It  is  the  rule  of  princes, 
priests,  aristocrats,  and  sentimentalists.  It  is 
the  rule  of  the  mob,  because  the  mob  is  in  its 
rulers.  The  man  that  feels  himself  endowed 
with  exclusive  and  peculiar  rights  to  be  royal, 
noble,  religious,  artistic  or  scientific  is  a  vision- 
ary ;  the  rapture  and  fanaticism  of  the  mass  is 
in  him.  He  is  not  yet  integrated  and  individ- 
ualized ;  he  has  yet  to  become  a  self-governing 
person,  a  poet,  an  artist,  a  man  of  the  people. 

XIII. — The  man  of  the  modern  spirit  refuses 
to  rule  the  people;  he  would  rather  die  than  do 
it.  He  gives  his  life  that  the  people  may  rule 
themselves.  He  will  not  raise  a  flag,  pronounce 
a  shibboleth,  or  preach  a  crusade.  He  will  not 
drive  the  people  mad  with  a  fine  sentiment,  or 
kill  his  enemies  with  an  abstraction.  He  does 
not  care  for  clans  or  gangs,  for  the  union  of 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

labor,  the  commnnism  of  capital,  or  for  any 
other  kind  of  mobbery.  We  will  make  the 
masses  men.  He  has  set  his  heart  not  upon 
solidarity — the  union  of  men  in  interest  and 
sentiment — but  upon  unanimity,  the  union  in 
faith  and  will ;  and  he  will  dissolve  every  bulk 
and  corporation  that  withstands  him  until  he 
shall  arrive  there. 


90 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE  SOVEREIGNTy  OF  THE  PEOPLE. 

I. — To  say  that  the  sovereignty  is  in  the  peo- 
ple is  the  same  as  to  say  that  the  Kingdom  of 
God  is  within  you — which  is  the  creed  of  the^ 
religion  of  democracy.     It  requires  that  every 
man  shall  be  his  own  taskmaster,  and  it  is  the 
negation  of  every  external  and  conventional  au- 
thority.    The  life  of  government  is  force,  and 
when  a  democratic  man  uses  force  he  takes  a 
personal  responsibility,   and   will  not    shelter 
himself   behind    a    governmental   corporation. 
In  that  there  is  no  sovereignty ;  the  sovereignty 
is  in  the  man.     The  justification  of  force  is  its 
justice;  there  is  no  longer  any  other  available 
sanction.     It  is  no  longer  necessary  to  be  patri- 
otic, or  what  is  called  in  the  cant  of  courtiers, 
loyal,  but  it  is  necessary  to  do  what  to  you 
seems  human,  and  to  meet  God.     There  is  no 
power  in  the  state  to  shrive  you ;  how  then  dare 
you  do  the  bidding  of  the  state? 

9X 


■"«^  —  — -  ■ 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

This  fiction  of  governmental  sovereignty — 
snag  of  the  old  regime — sticks  fast  here  in  the 
soil  of  democracy;  but  it  must,  at  whatever  cost 
of  sweat  and  blood,  be  rooted  out.  Vicksburg 
and  Gettysburg  have  given  their  witness  for 
the  sovereignty  of  the  people;  and  so,  we  trust, 
have  Manila  and  Santiago  de  Cuba. 

We  have  no  right  in  the  Spanish  islands  but 
human  rights,  and  the  sovereignty  of  the  Span- 
ish state  has  withstood  us.  But  what  have  the 
people  cared  for  that?  Over  the  ruins  of  the 
Spanish  state  sovereignty  the  guns  of  the  Amer- 
ican people  have  saluted  the  enfranchised  citi- 
zens of  Spain.  The  people  must  do  what  is 
necessary  to  make  this  message  good,  though 
every  gibbering  ghost  of  European  political 
witchcraft  should  rise  up  and  menace  in  the 
way.  For  we  have  a  greeting  also  for  the  peo- 
ple of  Russia  and  France,  the  people  of  Eng- 
land, Italy,  Germany  and  Austria;  we  have 
guns  for  a  royal  salutation  to  all  the  awaken- 
ing peoples  of  the  world.  But  Americans  who 
talk  of  empire  know  not  what  manner  of  spirit 
they  are  of. 

II. — They  dream  also  who  suppose  that  the 
Civil  War  was  fought  over  a  question  of  geog- 
raphy, like  the  old  dynastic  feuds.     America 


'J% 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

did  not  spend  a  million  lives  of  men  for  the 
sake  of  transferring  the  sovereignty  of  state 
from  Richmond  to  Washington.  The  Civil 
War  was  the  revolt  of  the  people  against  the 
priests  of  politics;  it  defied  the  constitution 
and  flouted  every  rite  of  legalism  to  free  slaves. 
The  Civil  War  was  a  revolution.  It  was  fol- 
lowed, like  every  other  revolution  wrought  in 
violence,  by  a  recoil,  a  counter-revolution ;  and 
the  old  political  superstition  has  thriven  like  a 
ghoul  on  the  graves  of  the  revolters. 

Treason? — that  is  a  word  to  be  written  by  the 
side  of  heresy  iu  the  catalogue  of  crime.  Both 
are  relics  of  the  old  regime.  A  man  may  still 
be  a  rascal  and  a  liar,  but  leze  majesty? — it  is 
unintelligible.  If  you  run  counter  to  the  crowd 
you  may  be  done  to  death,  as  in  the  old  times, 
but  we  will  not  damn  you  by  law.  We  do  not 
pass  bills  of  attainder  any  more,  or  bestow  bless- 
ings and  curses  in  statutes.  There  can  be  in  a 
democracy  no  such  thing  as  the  crime  of  trea- 
son, unless  indeed  it  be  such  to  attempt  to  set 
up,  over  against  the  sovereignty  of  the  people,  a 
governmental  corporation  to  keep  their  con- 
sciences. On  the  day  that  it  ceased  to  be  right 
to  do  a  thing  on  the  sole  grouud  that  the  priest 
or  the  prince  commanded  it,  the  crime  of  trea- 
son and  the  crime  of  heresy  became  alike  ab- 

93 


r\ 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

surd.  If  John  must  judge  for  himself  on  peril 
of  his  soul,  it  is  hardly  reasonable  to  excommu- 
nicate him  for  judging  against  the  crowd. 

The  Revised  Statutes  of  the  United  States 
make  it  treason  for  an  American  to  say  any- 
thing to  any  foreign  man  and  stranger  that 
might  make  it  harder  for  the  American  govern- 
ment to  do  whatever  it  may  have  in  its  mind 
to  do.  But  the  Revised  Statutes  are  to  be 
again  revised. 

Democracy  lifts  up  its  Standard  against  both 
Guelph  and  Ghibelline,  and  sees  not  much 
difference  between  the  politics  of  Ultramon- 
tanes  and  the  Ultramontanism  of  politics. 

III. — The  radical  idea  of  the  sovereignty  of 
government  is  unquestionable  right  and  un- 
contiollable  power  lodged  in  some  person  or 
corporation  whereunto  the  people  must  and 
ought  to  yield  obedience.  It  is  the  product  of  a 
refined  ecclesiastical  philosophy,  and  by  subtle 
implications  it  links  to  the  temporal  a  kind  of 
spiritual  authority.  It  grew  up  out  of  the  me- 
diaeval strife  between  Pope  and  Emperor,  and 
reached  its  full  bloom  and  perfection  after  Prot- 
estantism had  bereft  the  people  of  their  former 
spiritual  masters.  It  is  not  necessarily  asso- 
ciated with  the  divine  right  of  kings;  the  di- 

94 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

vine  right  of  parliaments,  and  popular  majori- 
ties have  served  as  well— jnst  as  Protestant 
church  councils  have  served  as  well  as  the  Pope 
to  settle  orthodoxy  and  punish  heretics. 

Of  course  the  freshness  has  gone  now  from 
the  bloom  of  the  thing;  and  the  sovereignty  of 
the  State  to-day  is  only  a  faded  remnant  of 
what  it  has  been  in  the  past.  It  has  become 
difficult  to  explain;  the  doctors  of  law  write 
voluminous  chapters  about  it,  without  making 
the  matter  clear.  However,  a  historical  prin- 
ciple may  live  on  for  a  while, though  the  brains 
be  out  of  it. 

The  practical  effect  of  the  tradition  is  the 
current  theory  of  national  solidarity  which 
makes  it  disgraceful,  if  not  a  crime,  for  a  citizen 
to  dissent  from  the  majority  in  any  matter  con- 
cerning the  people  that  live  outside  the  charmed 
circle  of  the  national  lot.  Time  was  when  such 
a  notion  was  an  ingenuous  superstition;  but  it 
is  difficult  now  to  let  it  pass  under  that  descrip- 
tion. As  a  policy  it  is  reactionary  and  anachro- 
nistic, and  r.s  a  sentiment  it  seems  to  be  cant. 

This  en-bloc  theory  of  nationality  makes  the 
government  responsible  for  the  opinion  and  de- 
portment of  every  citizen,  on  the  good  old-time 
principle—explicitly  invoked  by  Washington 
and  the  fathers,  with  quotations  from  Vattel 

95 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

and  the  pundits — that  theqgovernment  is  sov- 
ereign and  the  people  subject,  which  is  contrary 
to  the  fact  as  we  understand  it  at  the  present 
day.  Hence  have  come  all  the  complexities  of 
our  neutrality  laws,  whereby  the  courts  have 
arrived  at  length  at  the  conclusion,  worthy 
of  the  casuistry  of  mediaeval  schoolmen,  that, 
whereas,  an  American  patriot  may  with  a  clear 
conscience  arm  and  -equip  a  ship  in  an  Ameri- 
can port  and  sail  away  and  sell  it  to  a  bellig- 
erent— providing  ahvays  he  do  it  strictly  in  the 
way  of  trade,  and  to  turn  a  penny — it  is,  on  the 
other  hand,  a  felony  to  furnish  a  hod  of  coal  if 
you  do  it  for  love  of  a  cause. 

IV. — The  logic  of  national  solidarity  is  a 
Chinese  wall  with  stupidity  and  stoppage  of 
the  mail.  Certainly  without  such  helps  it  be- 
comes impossible  to  keep  peace  between  the  na- 
tions. National  solidarities,  when  they  are  per- 
mitted to  meet,  are  mutually  repellent  and 
antagonistic.  Loj^alty  becomes  a  synonym  for 
moral  lawlessness,  the  welter  and  confusion  of 
irrational  war.  Beati  possidentes  is  the  law^ 
of  nations,  and  diplomacy  is  a  ruthless  game. 
There  is  room  in  this  world  for  not  more  than 
one  sovereign  and  interiorly  stolid  state;  but 
as  suspicion  breeds  suspicion,  so  this  sovereign- 

96 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

ty  acd  solidarity  begets  a  monster  to  destroy 
it.  In  America  the  natural  gravitaticn  of 
State  sovereignty  is  to  United  States  soveveign- 
ty ;  thence  the  road  would  lie  to  Anglo-Saxon- 
dom  or  Pan-Americandom,  and  so  forth,  until 
half  the  world  should  fall  heavily  upon  the 
other  half,  and  everything  that  is  precious 
should  be  broken  to  pieces.  After  that  we 
might  begin  the  round  again,  and  so  on— -world 
without  end.  But  since  this  sovereignty  of  State 
cannnot  love  its  enemies  it  never  can  save  the 

world. 

Democracy  pays  only  a  passing  and  provi- 
sional respect  to  the  metes  and  bounds  of  na- 
tionalities. Blood  is  truly  thicker  than  water; 
the  nations  are  all  of  one  blood,  and  rivers  and 
oceans  cannot  divide  them. 

The  people  will  have  governments,  as  many 
as  may  be  convenient  and  for  as  long  a  time  as 
they  are  useful  to  defend  the  lives  of  the  weak 
and  the  property  of  the  poor,  to  arrest  the  rob- 
bers, run  the  mails,  and  make  the  cities  glori- 
ous; but  the  people  will  not  have  sovereign  gov- 
ernments for  long.  There  was  perhaps  a  time 
when  devotion  to  the  tribe  was  the  way  of  the 
soul,  leading  to  virtue  and  the  humanities. 
Perhaps  there  was  a  time  when  the  worship  of 
a  piece  of  land  to  the  disparagement  of  the  rest 

97 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

of  the  earth  was  economizable  to  moral  ends. 
But  that  is  past;  it  is  not  good — it  is  not  in 
honesty  possible  to  follow  a  tribe  after  one  has 
met  and  known  the  brave  men  and  sweet 
women  of  other  tribes.  And  now  there  can  be 
no  holy  or  unholy  ground,  since  after  all  we 
have  left  the  sepulcher  of  the  man  of  the  mod- 
ern world  in  the  hands  of  the  unbelievers. 

The  augurs  of  the  political  superstition  may 
take  their  rolejau  serieux;  but  the  people  nudge 
one  another  as  they  pass  them  in  the  streets.  A 
few  more  battles  fought  from  habit  and  momen- 
tum, and  European  armies  that  confront  each 
other  with  so  grim  and  threatening  an  aspect 
will  laugh  out  loud  at  the  credulity  of  their 
masters,  and  fling  themselves  into  each  other's 
arms. 

V. — The  democracy  of  the  new  day  does  not 
despise  government  as  such,  or  hold  it  under 
suspicion.  It  is  not  to  be  defined  by  any  of  the 
traditional  theories  of  political  liberty.  It  does 
not  accept  the  doctrinaireism  of  Thomas  Jef- 
ferson, nor  does  it  philosophize  with  Stuart 
Mill.  The  liberty  for  which  it  strives  is  not  a 
negation,  the  mere  absence  of  restraint;  it  ia 
the  expansion  and  elevation  of  life  in  the  real- 
ization of  beauty  and  justice.     And  it  would 

98 


The  Relig-ion  of  Democracy. 

cook  the  people's  food  and  wash  their  clothes 
by  law,  if  liberty  and  justice  should  require  it. 
It  feels  DO  shrinking  from  the  use  of  force;  its 
God  is  the  God  of  energy  and  insistence,  and 
His  compulsions  are  in  their  way  as  good  as  His 
gifts  and  graces. 

Democratic  government  is  the  concurrence  of 
the  most  forceful  and  effective  persons  in  so- 
ciety to  the  ends  of  beauty  and  justice.  So 
long  as  the  most  forceful  persons  do  not  care 
for  these  things  but  prefer  glory  and  privilege, 
democratic  government  is  impossible,  and  we 
are  left  to  the  rule  of  an  aristocracy  of  politi- 
cians and  promoters,  the  dreariest  aristocracy, 
on  the  whole,  that  the  world  has  ever  seen. 
Yet  unquestionably  these  are,  as  yet,  the  most 
forceful  persons,  else  they  would  not  have  their 

way. 

Not  what  he  can  get  by  it,  but  what  he  would 
cheerfully  lose  for  it,  is  the  measure  of  a  man's 
love  of  justice,  and  myriads  of  justice-seekers 
for  the  sake  of  the  profits  could  never  found  or 
enforce  a  democratic  government.  They  are 
wax  in  the  hands  of  the  politicians  and  promo- 
ters, because  their  spokesmen  can  be  bought. 
Money  rules  because  men  are  for  sale.  The 
gist  of  democratic  government  is  the  self-gov- 
erning of  the  governors,  and  the  warrant  of 

99 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

their  office  is  voluntary  servitude.  They 
must  share  the  privation  and  exposure  of  the 
workers,  and  the  spring  of  their  power  shall  be 
that  they  breed  in  the  people  a  love  of  justice. 
The  people  will  love  justice  when  they  see  jus- 
tice— when  they  behold  the  beauty  of  it  in  the 
faces  of  men  who  prefer  it  to  a  privilege.  The 
sovereignty  of  the  people  can  be  borne  only  by 
men  who  are  of  the  people — men  who  will  not 
have  anything  that  all  others  may  not  have  on 
the  same  terms. 

VI. — Strictly  speaking,  democracy  is  the  de- 
spair of  politics  and  the  destruction  of  politi- 
cians. The  body  of  politics  is  privilege.  Since 
civil  government  began  one  class  has  always 
preyed  upon  another,  and  that  through  the  exer- 
cise of  privilege  legally  guaranteed.  The  prob- 
lem of  the  politicians  has  always  been  very 
simple  in  principle,  although  exceedingly  com- 
plex in  its  practical  presentment  because  of  the 
infinite  variation  of  circumstances.  The  prob- 
lem is :  How  to  make  the  social  privileges  co- 
incide with  the  natural  powers;  or,  in  other 
words:  How  to  so  arrange  matters  that  the  so- 
cial advantages  shall  tranquilly  rest  with  those 
who  have  the  natural  power  to  maintain  them. 

If  the  sense  of  justi<3e  could  be  wholly  elimi- 

100 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

natedfrom  the  human  soul  the  problem  of  prac- 
tical politics  would  be  vastly  simplified— the 
most  stable  state  being  that  which  is  most  sor- 
did. But  the  sense  of  justice  never  has  been 
eliminated,  not  even  from  the  souls  of  politi- 
cians, and  so  the  political  problem,  though 
commonly  admitting  of  some  kind  of  tempo- 
rary adjustment,  has  become  increasingly  dif- 
ficult, with  the  rise  and  prevalence  of  the  mod- 
ern spirit. 

Among  what  are  called  the  progressive  peo- 
ples, the  natural  powers  have  never  even  for  a 
moment  been  made  to  exactly  coincide  with  the 
social  privileges,  because  with  the  people  the 
natural    powers    are    in    perpetual    flux    and 
change.     Kature,  in  its  long,  slow  processes,  is 
on  the  side  of  justice,  and  so   is  forever  bring- 
ing both   privileges  and   politics  to  confusion. 
The  most  successful  politicians  are  those  most 
sensible  of  this  flow  of  things;  and   they  have 
devised    systems    adaptive    and    flexible,  pro- 
claiming in   one  form  or  another  a  career  for 
talent,  by  which  is  meant  a  progressive  appor- 
tionment of  privileges  according  to  the  muta- 
tions of  power.     But   the  intrinsic  justice  of 
things  has  outwitted  even   these,  through  the 
operation   of  the   principle,  little  regarded  by 
politicians,  that  privilege   is  in  its  very  nature 

101 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

weakening,  that  it  tends  to  giddiness  and  ab- 
straction, taking  the  vef^ve  and  veracity  out  of 
men  and  rendering  them  incapable  of  dealing 
effectively  with  the  world  as  it  really  is. 

However,  by  one  turn  and  another,  by  shift 
and  compromise,  and  high  exercise  in  a  deli- 
cate art  of  balancing,  the  politicians  have  kept 
the  saddle  and  have  arrived  upon  the  present 
scene.  The  point  is  that  the  continuation  of 
their  career  depends  upon  the  perpetuation  of 
pri^vilege.  The  destroyers  of  privilege  shall 
unhorse  the  politicians  and  put  an  end  to  poli- 
tics, clearing  the  way  for  a  business-like  admin- 
istration by  an  improved  kind  of  business  men. 

But  privilege  is  the  passion  of  the  mob.  The 
strength  of  it  is  not  only  in  the  oppressors,  but 
also  in  the  madness  and  folly  of  the  oppressed. 
The'soui  of  it  is  sentimentality,  the  impostures 
of  Chauvinism,  sectionalism  and  party  loyalty, 
the  repulsion  for  labor,  and  the  desire  to  escape 
from  the  reality  of  the  world.  The  destroyers 
of  privilege  must  then  be  of  stout  fiber  to  hold 
the  people  to  veracity,  tough  campaigners  for 
whom  a  knapsack  and  a  canteen  will  easily 
suffice.  The  administrators  of  democratic  gov- 
ernment must  be  canny  men,  craftsmen,  ar- 
tists and  men  of  affairs,  that  can  fix  their  minds 
upon  the  concrete,  cut  through  the  wilderness 

102 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

of  fine  sentiments,  and  bureaucratic  formulas, 
and  get  things  done. 

VIL— Democratic  government  is  the  stand- 
ing together  of  a  multitude  of  men  who  could 
each  stand  alone.     Its    business  is  to  balk  the 
mob  of  the  fraudulent  gains  of  a  sordid   good- 
fellowship  and  to  brace  them  to  moral  independ- 
ence.    As  the  scheme  of  the  creation  is  the  in- 
tegrating of  free  souls  out  of  the  soul  of  God, 
and  as  God  thrusts  forth  his  child  and  veils  His 
own  face  with  ever  thicker  veils,  waiting  with 
infinite  restraint  for  the  man  to  act  from  within 
himself  in  original  love,  so  democratic  govern- 
ment must  reflect  the  austerity  of  God ;  must 
break  up  the   solidarity  of  passion   and   pelf  to 
the  ends  of  unanimity— the  voluntary  co-opera- 
tion of  free  persons.     This  austerity  of  govern- 
ment is  in  its  nature  temporary  and  provisional; 
its  best  success  is  to  make  itself  unnecessary ; 
but  while  it  lasts  it  is  force.     It  is  a  fond  say- 
ing that  government  derives   its  just   powers 
from  the  consent  of  the  governed.     Just  gov- 
ernment exists  by  the  force  of  the  self-govern- 
ing in  repression   of  the    unjust.     When  the 
governed  consent  to  justice  government  will 
have  served  its  time  and  can  pass  into  the  free 
and  unanimous  co-operation  of  the  people. 

103 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

To  say  that  government  in  America  is 
corrupt  is  to  say  that  it  is  soft.  It  must  be 
steel-fibered  if  it  would  get  its  work  done  and 
pass  into  fraternity.  The  mob  would  make  it 
an  alma  mater,  a  tender  providence.  And  so 
we  are  ruled  by  sentimentality  and  the  stomach 
— which  is  plutocracy. 

VIII. — So  long  as  the  shibboleths  of  democ- 
racy are  on  every  tongue,  rich  men  cannot  com- 
mand the  mass  of  the  people  in  their  own  per- 
sons as  rich  men,  surrounded  as  they  are  by 
the  externals  of  luxury  and  privilege.  If  they 
rule  they  must  do  it  by  deputy.  The  necessary 
form  of  plutocracy  is  the  rule  of  a  supreme 
good  fellow — a  boss.  The  deputy  must  stand 
close  to  the  majority  and  greet  the  children  in 
the  street.  There  must  be  in  him  a  mixture  of 
shrewdness  and  simplicity — shrewdness  to  fol- 
low, with  unerring  instinct  of  profit,  the  intri- 
cate lines  of  a  thousand  interests  and  simplicity 
that  he  may  seem  even  to  himself  a  kind  of 
great-heart  Robin  Hood  mulcting  the  rich  for 
the  sake  of  the  poor,  whereas  his  real  ofiSce  is 
the  opposite  of  that. 

The  government  is  corrupt  because  the  people 
are  thralled  in  the  traditional  sentiment  of  gov- 
ernmental sovereignty.     It  is  because  they  try 

104 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

to  make  the  State  a  nourishing  mother— which 
in  the  nature  of  things  it  cannot  be— that  it  be- 
comes instead  a  sort  of  vampire.  The  people 
would  get  justice  if  they  loved  justice;  it  is 
because  they  love  privilege  that  they  are  plun- 
dered. The  government  is  cruel  and  violent 
because  it  is  weak  and  sentimental.  We  have 
called  in  the  police  to  compel  each  other  to  do 
good,  and  so  we  are  bullied  with  bludgeons. 
It  is  necessary  to  discredit  the  political  theories 
of  Caius  Gracchus,  to  abolish  the  public  cir- 
cuses and  the  bread  dole,  in  order  that  the  peo- 
ple may  not  starve. 

The  only  hope  of  municipal  or  other  govern- 
mental reform  is  that  the  people  shall  come  to 
believe  in  God  and  to  hate  and  destroy  privi- 
lege. But  the  people  will  not  submit  to  be  re- 
buked for  their  love  of  privilege  by  pampered 
men  and  representatives  of  a  caste. 

Crusades  by  scribes  and  doctors  against  the 
publicans  and'harlots,  the  gilded  league  of  schol- 
ars in  politics  listed  in  bustling  combat  against 
the  Prince  of  the  Power  of  the  Air— these 
things  make  passing  contribution  to  the  gen- 
eral fund  of  humor,  but  they  do  not  help  the 
people  to  refrain  themselves  or  to  believe  in 
God. 


105 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

IX. — Tragic  comedy  of  the  Tagal  trench  I 
On  one  side  stand  the  valiant  little  brown  men, 
newly  wakened,  starting  up  out  of  ages  of  sleep, 
bearing  stubborn,  formidable  arms  to  defend  the 
Natural  "Rights  of  Men  and  the  resounding  prin- 
ciples of  the  French  Revolution  a  centurj^  be- 
hind the  clock !  On  the  other  side  thirty  thou- 
sand, and  ever  more  and  more,  ingenuous  boys 
out  of  Yankeedom,  suckled  in  these  same  theo- 
ries and  bred  manfully  up  in  the  willful  gospel 
of  pick-and-choose,  are  shooting  in  a  grim, 
nonchalant,  disengaged  way — not  because  they 
approve  the  action,  but  because  of  supposed 
irresistible,  divine  decrees  uttered  out  of  some 
Rocky  Mountain  Horeb.  In  the  background  are 
a  great  many  rapt  patriots  in  prayer,  not  a  few 
marketmen  and  promoters,  pressing  for  the  in- 
terests of  civilization — and  an  English  poet 
singing  psalms.  Still  farther  in  the  back- 
ground in  clear  air,  stand  a  million  men  or  so 
who  do  not  wholly  misunderstand.  These  are 
tracing  out  a  thesis  fraught  with  amazement 
and  discomfiture  for  the  conservative  and  com- 
placent classes  who  make  war  for  the  extension 
of  commerce  and  the  enlargement  of  property 
rights. 

The  thesis  is  that  since  it  is  to  be  admitted 
that  God  did  not  give  the  Philippine  Islands  to 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

the  Filipinos,  to  tbe  exclusion  of  the  general  in- 
terests of  the  human  race,  so  also  it  is  to  be 
asserted  that  all  material  possessions,  even  in 
Europe  and  America,  are  held  subject  to  the  like 
considerations.  It  is  coming  to  light  in  an  un- 
expected way  that  property  is  not  the  datum  and 
foundation  of  society  but  the  institution  and 
creature  thereof.  It  appears  that  the  whole 
earth  and  the  seas  belong  not  to  the  rich,  to  the 
capable  or  the  legitimate,  but  to  men,  to  human- 
ity, and  that  the  supreme  source  of  human  law 
is  not  nature  or  necessity,  but  a  certain  sublime, 
sweet  reasonableness  wherein  alone  it  is  pos- 
sible for  individuals  to  escape  from  their  awful 
isolation  and  to  meet  and  understand  one  an- 
other. 

The  nineteenth  century  has  wrought  for  the 
rights  of  property  and  the  sovereignty  of 
states.  Its  grand  preoccupation  has  been  the 
attempt  to  define  the  individual  soul  inmate- 
rial  terms^  to  draw  in  the  dust  with  a  firm  fin- 
ger a  sr.ored  cincture  around  a  Person.  The 
transcendental  sovereignty  of  State  and  the 
Sinaitic  sacredness  of  property  are  pious  inven- 
tions made  in  the  interest  of  this  mathematical 
definition  of  the  soul— there  was  need  of  a  Firm 
Finger,  and  of  Indelible  Dust!  The  twentieth 
century  is  to  disclose   the  individual  in  bis 

107 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

original  and  eternal  franchise.  It  will  be  seen 
that  liberty  does  not  rise  up  out  of  the  ground, 
but  is  born  from  above;  that  it  is  not  derived 
from  a  definition,  and  does  not  depend  upon 
stage  machinery. 

The  Tagal  trench  is  the  last  ditch  of  doctri- 
naire democracy — the  fainting  century  sinks 
down  here  on  the  edge  of  the  utmost  West. 
Here  the  empire  of  property  plunges  to  the 
verge.  This  tangle  of  contradictions  at  the  place 
where  the  sun  both  ends  and  begins  his  course 
is  the  interrogation  mark  with  which  the  pass- 
ing century  punctuates  its  period.  The  twen- 
tieth century  must  answer  with  the  proclama- 
tion of  a  new  affirmative. 

Over  against  the  rights  of  property  and  the 
sovereignty  of  nationalities,  the  new  century 
will  proclaim  the  rights  and  sovereignty  of  the 
soul.  There  are  no  natural  rights  of  men  that 
can  stand  against  the  spiritual  rights  of  men. 
It  shall  be  shown  that  prop('.rty  does  not  exist 
in  the  nature  of  things;  that  no  man  can  own 
anything  by  mere  natural  rights — no,  not  his 
own  body.  That  property  is  authentically  an 
attribute  of  the  regenerate,  creative  soul,  and 
that  the  only  good  title  is  one  written  in  fur- 
therance of  the  eternal  equality  and  justice. 

In  the  negation  of  all    natural  rights,  the 

108 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

Right  is  disclosed ;  in  the  denial  of  every  defini- 
tion of  liberty,  liberty  breaks  its  bonds  and  en- 
ters into  its  infinite  f ranch isement,  and  out  of 
the  unmeasured  assertion  of  a  man's  obligation 
to  universal  society  for  the  very  texture  and 
quality  of  his  flesh  and  bones,  is  born  the  sov- 
ereign, individual  souL 


109 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


CHAPTER  YII. 

THE  WORLD  OF  NEWS. 

I. — The  evangel  of  democracy  shall  convince 
the  people  of  the  independence  and  self-gov- 
ernment of  God.  The  slavishness  of  the  world 
has  made  it  hard  to  believe  that  God  is  free; 
and  the  proclamation  of  the  freedom  of  God 
shall  be  the  enfranchisement  of  the  people. 

It  is  a  servile  kind  of  science— the  science  of 
lawyers  and  pedagogues — that  makes  God  sub- 
ject to  laws ;  who,  then,  is  the  God  of  God?  Let 
us  worship  Him! 

The  final  guarantee  of  liberty  is  the  assur- 
ance in  the  people  that  the  government  of  the 
soul  is  of  the  soul  and  for  the  soul.  The  deep- 
est thing  in  the  religion  of  democracy  is  the  be- 
lief in  the  universality  of  the  miraculous.  The 
defect  of  the  miracle  theories  of  the  old 
regime  is  that  they  are  aristocratic ;  they  make 
miracles  a  privilege  and  a  monopoly,  and  God 
a  kind  of  Stuart  king  breaking  the  constitution 

110 


The  Relig-ion  of  Democracy. 

for  the  pleasure  of  his  courtiers  and  the  confu- 
sion of  the  commons.  In  their  assertion  of  lib- 
ert}'  they  do  not  go  far  enough  to  amount  to 
more  than  mutiny  and  whim.  They  show  the 
traditional  miracles  as  flashes  of  light  that 
serve  but  to  make  the  darkness  felt.  If  God 
has  only  so  much  of  liberty,  then  Fate  is  strong 
Indeed. 

The  modern  world  claims  the  miraculous  on 
an  infinitely  greater  scale.  The  progress  of 
modern  science  is  the  confusion  of  all  the  ac- 
cepted classifications  and  the  abrogation  of  all 
the  established  laws.  It  is  perceived  that  every- 
thing in  nature  runs  and  flows.  There  is  no 
such  thing  as  finished  formulas,  and  every  dis- 
covery is  held  open  for  revision.  It  is  onlv  the 
sciolist  that  would  say  a  last  word.  Tho  prog- 
ress of  science  is  the  repeal  of  ecclesiastical 
dogma,  because  it  is  the  repeal  of  all  dogma— 
the  dogma  of  physics  as  of  metaphysics. 

Out  of  the  widening  experience  and  research 
one  persuasion  grows  and  strengthens,  rising 
into  a  song  of  revelation  and  a  profession  of 
faith.  It  is  discovered  that  everything  is  rea- 
sonable, that  everything  has  relation  to  every 
other  thing,  that  everywhere  is  rhythm,  and 
measure,  that  the  world  answers  back  to  the 
unity  of  the  mind,  and  is  sane. 

Ill 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

You  will  not  say  as  a  man  of  science  that 
gravitation  will  remain  to-morrow  just  what 
it  is  to-day,  but  only  that  you  are  persuaded 
that  if  God  changes  that  he  will  change  every- 
thing else  in  proportion.  And  doubtless,  if  the 
soul  of  a  child  should  stand  in  the  way  the 
planets  would  pause  and  gravitation  would 
turn  out.  God  will  have  a  care  that  the  mill 
shall  grind  only  ashes  and  bones. 

II. — The  happiness  of  the  age  is  the  discov- 
ery that  this  is  a  world  in  which  there  is  news. 
What  pedant  shall  say  that  the  laws  of  the 
universe  are  now  just  what  they  were  in  the 
former  age  of  steam,  or  when  the  ichthyosaurus 
paddled  the  secondary  seas?  Who  knows  any- 
thing about  that?  It  is  an  extremely  improba- 
ble surmise  obviously  designed  to  put  God  into 
a  corner.  It  is  prompted  by  the  theological 
habit  which  is  still  strong  among  us.  More 
likely  the  laws  are  different  every  day — if  only 
to  meeken  the  pedants  and  freshen  the  morn- 
ing. Enough  to  know  that  God  does  not  put 
to  intellectual  confusion  a  living  man  facing 
the  living  world. 

It  is  the  mournfulest  Calvinism  to  say  that 
the  universe  of  to-day  was  necessarily  involved 
in  that  of  the  day  before  yesterday,  or  neces- 

112 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

sarily  evolved  out  of  it.  The  theory  of  evolu- 
tion which  happens  at  this  moment  to  be  most 
widespread,  should  be  preached  only  with  a 
snufae,  or  in  a  Genevan  gown.  The  logic  of  fa- 
talism is  despotism;  left  to  itself  the  current 
dogma  of  predestinarian  evolution  would  balk 
the  hope  of  democracy  and  destroy  the  liberties 
of  the  earth.  But  it  is  not  left  to  itself ;  the 
spirit  of  the  age  protests.  ....     ;, 

The  exaltation  of  the  modern  spirit  is  m  the 
assurance  that  there  is  always  a  better  world  at 
hand      The  axioms  of  yesterday  are  not  the 
axioms  of  to-day.     At  last  it  becomes  possible 
to  believe  in  the  utter  efEacement  of  an  evil  and 
the  forgiveness  of  a  sin.     The  barnacled  insti- 
tutions of  society  break  loose  from  their  moor- 
ings and  are  committed  to  the  very  streana  of 
change      We  shut  the  book   of  statics,  and  at^ 
tend  only  to  the  dynamic  laws,  the  principles 
of  an  illimitable  orderliness  and  beautifulness 
and  the  demands  of  a  progressive  justice  that  ' 
reaches  to  tho  uttermost  love.   If  anybody  says: 
-Let  us  stop  here,  this  is  the  final  right  of  the 
matter,-   he  becomes  to-morrow   an    obstacle 
and  a  clog.     It  is  perceived  that  every  truth, 
the  propagation  of  which  is  endowed  and  estab- 
lished  is  a  folly  on  its  face,  and  necessarily 
false.  Pay  as  you  go,  is  the  principle  of  health, 

113 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

and  if  the  preaching  will  not  pay  its  keep,  and 
if  nobody  stands  ready  to  give  money  and  life 
for  it,  then  l^t  it  rest;  it  is  not  true  to-day. 
This  year's  fruit  must  be  nourished  from  this 
year's  sap.  The  charter  of  every  association 
that  shall  be  other  than  a  hindrance  and  a  dis- 
couragement must  be  worded  in  the  future 
tense,  and  the  getting  together  of  good  people  as 
such  is  degrading  and  a  public  nuisance, 

III. — In  a  world  in  which  the  phenomenal 
life  of  men  is  held  by  so  slight  a  tenure,  and  is 
constantly  exposed  to  mishaps  and  the  assaults 
of  enemies,  it  is  impossible  for  a  man  to  be  a 
minister  of  justice  if  he  is  afraid  to  die.  The 
world  is  managed  at  last  by  the  most  fearless, 
by  the  people  that  are  most  deeply  rooted  in 
the  substratum  of  things,  and  least  afraid  of 
accidents.  A  civilization  of  exquisite  refine- 
ment, with  all  the  appliances  of  wealth  and 
culture,  lies  at  the  mercy  of  the  barbarians 
across  the  border,  if  the  citizens  are  more 
afraid  of  death  than  the  barbarians  are.  And 
a  luxurious  and  skeptical  aristocracy  is  easily 
brought  to  confusion  by  the  uprising  of  a  peo- 
ple that  believe  in  God.  The  final  test  as  to 
which  of  two  things  shall  remain  standing  and 
which  shall  fall,  is  which  can  offer  the  more 

114 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

martyrs — for  which  do  men  in  greater  num- 
bers stand  ready  to  give  their  lives? 

The  conventional  statement  of  the  case  is 
that  the  world  is  ruled  by  force,  which  is  true 
enough  in  a  way ;  but  it  is  equally  and  more 
especially  true  that  the  world  is  ruled  by  faith. 
For  the  power  behind  the  throne  of  force  is 
fearlessness— which  is  faith  described  by  a  ne- 
gation. 

The  universe  does  not  drift  aimless,  and  the 
great  issues  are  not  settled  wrong.  If  the  bar- 
barians conquered  Rome,  it  was  because  there 
was  more  faith  and  fearlessness  in  Goth  and 
Vandal  than  there  was  on  the  other  side ;  and 
because  the  coarsest  kind  of  faith  seems  to  be 
worth  more  to  the  general  uses  than  the  finest 
kind  of  satire.  In  the  long  rnn  the  economy 
of  the  world  is  an  economy  of  courage,  and  the 
heaviest  battalions  are  heaviest  because  they 
are  willingest  to  die.  In  their  origin  aris- 
tocracies have  generally  owed  their  power  to 
their  pluck,  and  they  have  kept  their  places  as 
long  as  they  have  been  more  ready  than  the 
majority  to  put  their  lives  in  pawn — but  not 
much  longer. 

Civilization  finds  its  life  in  losing  it.  Its 
organs  do  their  work  well  in  the  degree  in 
which  they  take  the  eternal  for  granted  and  are 

115 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

moved  by  fearlessness  of  death  and  disregard 
of  the  inevitable  risks  and  losses.  The  har- 
mony and  grandeur  of  material  structure,  the 
common  conveniences,  the  elegance  of  living 
and  the  charm  of  civic  beauty,  these  it  appears 
can  be  got  not  by  a  soft  and  sensuous  people 
rapt  in  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  but  only  by  a 
people  of  blood  and  iron,  v^hose  happiness  does 
not  depend  upon  their  conveniences,  and  who 
do  not  shrink  from  death. 

It  thus  becomes  evident  that  the  groundwork 
of  civilization  is  in  the  unseen,  and  that  the 
Master-builder  of  the  City  of  Justice  is  Fear- 
lessness of  Death. 

This  fearlessness  is  the  beginning  of  science 
and  art.  It  makes  the  engines  of  manufacture 
and  war;  it  can  plow,  build  ships  and  rail- 
roads, and  plan  new  social  constitutions.  It  is 
the  awe  and  majesty  of  human  life — the  mys- 
tery and  the  magnificence;  it  makes  and  super- 
sedes the  rituals  of  all  religions,  and  it  creates 
the  great  poems  and  pictures. 

IV. — From  this  standpoint  it  is  seen  that 
neither  Rome  nor  any  other  sectarian  church  is 
qualified  to  set  up  that  universal  spiritual  power 
that  is  to  exalt  the  world.  The  faith  that  can  fur- 
nish the  energy  of  such  an  enterprise  must  be  of 

116 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


■^Jd 


the  elemental  kind,  the  faith  of  warriors,  artists 
and  explorers,  the  faith  of  laborers  and  of  illit- 
erate and  primitive  men,  the  faith  of  Jesus— 
and  of  children. 

The  work  of  the  Church  in  the  days  of  its  in- 
dispensable usefulness,  its  moral  glory,  was  to 
bring  this  brooding,  latent  faith  to  clear  and 
deliberate  consciousness,  that  it  might  know  itr 
self  and  comprehend  its  destiny  and  that  it 
might,  in  the  maturity  of  strenth,  grapple  with 
the  faithlessness,  the  moral  cowardice,  of  the 
antique  civilizations  and  put  them  to  perpetual 

shame.  .   j     ii       x 

The  drift  of  antiquity  was  to  put  death  out 
of  sight,  and  to  degrade  that  elemental  faith 
that  is  exercised   in  fearlessness  of  death.     It 
sophisticated  the  primary  life-issues  and  ob- 
scured the  significance  of  the  primary  facts  of 
existence,  as  that  one  must  labor  and  that  one 
must  die.    The  antique  world  did  not  very  seri- 
ously occupy  itself  with  social  reforms  or  the 
practical  achievement  of  Justice,  though  its  lit- 
erature teems  with  classics  of  Utopian  specula- 
tion     Its  passion  was  to  escape  from  the  world 
of  death  and  labor  into  a  realm  of  harmony 
and  justice  that  was  all  too  exclusively  ideal. 

Over     against     this    futile    aspiration    the 
Church  raised  up  a  working  faith.     But  the 

117 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

Child  of  the  Church  was  greater  than  its  foster- 
mother;  the  Church  could  not  itself  fulfill  the 
promise  of  its  faith.     The  ground  plan  of  the 
Church  was  not  grand  enough  to  contain  and 
accomplish  that  conscious,  catholic  faith  whose 
root  is  in  the  elemental  trustfulness  of  a  bar- 
barian or  a  child,  and  whose  fulfillment  is  uni- 
versal, social  revolution  and  the  establishment 
of  civilization  upon  new  and   spiritual  founda- 
tions.    The  Church  was  incapable  of  such  an 
achievement  because  its  framework,  its  polity, 
cultus  and  discipline  were  wrought  and  elabo- 
rated in  contravention  of  the  primordial  princi- 
ple of  faith.    Catholicism,  as  an  institution  and 
system,  was  irreconcilable  with  Catholicism  as 
a  moral  ideal  and  a  world-reforming  purpose 
—for  the  sufficient  reason  that  the  institution 
and  system  were  made  of  the  stuff  of  the  old 
world  that  so  needed  to  be  reformed.     The  cul- 
tus and  dogma  of  Catholicism  were  an  outcome 
of  Greek  culture  and  Roman   law ;  the  system 
was  conceived  and  worked  out  under  the  influ- 
ences that  had  created,  and  that  continued  to 
permeate  the   old  world  secular  society,  which 
were  in  a  general  sense  derived  from  the  idea 
that  a  man  must  make  the  most  of  himself—- 
the  idea  in  fine  of  the  self-made  man. 

The  scheme  of  Catholicism  furnished  a  sys- 

113 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

tern  of  delicate  devices  for  improving  and  puri- 
fying one's  own  soul  and  reaching  up  to  God. 
It  was  grounded  in  the  prepossession  that  the 
divinest  attitude  of  the  human  spirit  ia  as  of  one 
that  stands  tiptoe  on  the  earth  with  hands  and 
eyes  strained  upward  to  a  diviner  world— 
which  was  also  the  prepossession  of  Greek  cul- 
ture. Catholicism  could  not  conquer  or  com- 
prehend the  earth  because  of  its  profound  moral 
abstraction ;  its  aim  was  not  directed  toward 
the  earth,  but  toward  heaven.  Its  strained  ef- 
fort to  attain  to  the  ideal  became  a  corrup- 
tion and  scandal  in  the  flesh,  and  an  apostacy 
from  that  elemental  faith  of  plain  men,  which 
takes  God  for  granted  and  goes  forth  to  set 
things  right  upon  the  earth. 

v.— In  the  Renaissance,  the  naive  faith  of 
primitive  Christianity  became  conscious  that 
the  ecclesiastical  cultus  was  an  obstacle.  The 
essential  faith  of  the  Church  made  ready  to 
break  its  barriers  and  to  undertake  the  radical 
conversion  of  the  society  and  the  conquest  of 
the  world.  Faith  was  quickened  into  self-con- 
sciousness by  the  antagonism  of  its  opposites, 
and  rose  up  into  the  strength  of  the  modern 
spirit.  The  revival  of  letters  was  not  a  return 
to  Greece,  but  a  conversion  of  Greek  learning 

xx9 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


i3 


to  the  uses  of  faith  and  to  the  ends  of  a  modern 
civilization  which  claims  all  history  and 
achievement,  and  rejoices  in  all,  and  whose  fra- 
ternity reaches  back. 

The  characteristic    attitude  of  the  faith  of 
modernity  is  that  of  one  with  firm-set  feet  and 
forth-right  eyes  intent  upon  the  beautilessness 
of  the  world.  Religion  is  ceasing  to  be  thought 
of  as  an  aspiration  after  the  divine,  and  is  com- 
ing to  be  nothing  but  sheer  trust  in  God  despite 
all   difficulties,  a  conception   that  seems  both 
primitive  and   unsophisticated,  and   also  final 
and    scientific.     The  cultus   of  the   churches, 
their  casuistries  and  spiritual  calisthenics,  their 
elaborate  means  of  grace  and  their  striving, 
rapturous  prayers  are  of  the  old  world — Hel- 
lenic, without  the  measure  and  sincerity  of  the 
Greek,  and  Hebraic  without  the  sobriety  and 
realism  of  the  Jew.     They  are  the  old  world 
minus  what  made  the  old  world  livable.     The 
spring  of  their  intricate  perversions  is  the  feel- 
ing   that    something  — anything  — everything 
must  be  done  to  find  out  what  the  will  of  God 
is;  whereas  the  desire  of  God  through  tbe  ages 
seems  to  be  that  a  man  should  come  at  length 
to  have  a  reasonable  will  of  his  own.     This  is 
an  idea  that  seems  hardly  to  have  dawned  upon 
the  ecclesiastical  mind,  although  the  life  of  the 

l;vO 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

secular  world  is  aglow  with  the  feeling  that 
liberty  is  a  reality,  that  a  liviog  man  can  con- 
ceive and  execute  designs  that  contain  an  ele- 
ment of  utter  and  absolute  originality,  and 
that  God  will  back  up  a  good  plan,  even  though 
he  may  not  have  furnished,  and  indeed  would 
not  furnish  the  specifications  in  advance. 

The  consciousness  of  freedom  grows  apace. 
It  is  no  longer  possible  to  believe  that  God  is 
the  author  of  the  confusions  of  history  or  the 
fearful  iniquities  of  social  institutions.  We 
perceive  that  we  are  jointly  responsible  with 
Him  for  the  present  condition  of  the  universe. 
It  appears  that  the  providence  of  God  is  lim- 
ited to  making  the  best  of  every  emergency  so 
far  as  may  be  done  consistently  with  the  liberty 
and  responsibility  of  men.  And  it  by  no  means 
follows  that  He  established  the  existing 
churches,  states,  law-codes,  and  commercial 
customs  because  they  exist. 

Not  only  is  it  true  that  the  world  as  it  stands 
to-day  is  not  a  theocracy,  but  it  appears  that 
theocracy  is  not  a  thing  to  be  desired— that  God 
will  not  have  it  so.  The  revelation  of  history 
and  of  all  experience  is  that  God  will  not  reign 
over  the  people,  but  has  set  His  heart  upon  it 
that  through  faith  in  Him  the  people  shall 
reign  over  themselves. 

1^1 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

The  beginning  of  history  is  in  theocracy ;  but 
democracy  is  the  consummation.  And  all  the 
intermediate  stages  of  confusion  and  bewilder- 
ment, of  misery  and  disappointment,  are,  it 
would  seem,  better  in  the  eyes  of  God,  and 
more  desirable  than  the  sway  of  unquestioned 
goodness,  and  the  smooth  obedience  of  a  puppet 
world. 

VI. — The  reasonable  object  of  devotion  is  dis- 
closed not  as  a  thing  recondite  and  obscure,  but 
as  the  most  obvious  thing  and  what  might  have 
been  expected.  The  business  of  a  man  is  to 
carve  into  the  substance  of  this  visible  world 
the  most  excellent  thing  that — in  the  face  of  the 
scanned  and  sifted  facts— he  can  clearly  think. 
Probably  there  is  nothing  too  good  for  God, 
and  everything  is  plastic  to  fine  art  and  reform. 
Though  stupidity  and  fear  beset  the  path  with 
difficulties,  and  make  it  bristle  with  menace, 
still  it  is  reasonable  to  insist  that  the  thing  most 
practical  is  that  w^hich  is  most  humane,  most 
exalted  and  most  just.  It  is  hard  to  reform  a 
jail  without  getting  into  it,  or  to  take  off  a  tea 
tax  without  a  revolution ;  there  is  an  inertia  of 
well-meaning  dullness  that  seems  like  fatality 
— like  the  slow  crunching  of  a  traveler's  bones 
in  the  crack  of  a  glacier. 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

But  the  traveler  journeys  on,  for  the  traveler 
is  the  soul. 

VII. — It  is  a  superficial  judgment  that  this 
is  a  sordid  and  God-forgetting  age,  because  it 
is  occupied  with  questions  of  board  and  clothes, 
and  bent  upon  getting  them  settled  right.  If 
the  people  were  sordid  and  had  lost  faith  in  the 
eternal  justice,  they  would  not  risk  their  half 
loaf  on  the  dangerous  chance  of  getting  a  whole 
one.  It  has  been  finely  said  that  a  gentleman  is 
one  who  stands  ready  to  lay  down  his  life  for 
little  things,  and  that  is  the  temper  of  democ- 
racy. 

If  the  people  are  willing  to  risk  everything 
for  the  sake  of  a  circumstance,  it  is  because  they 
have  an  unformulated  faith  in  the  reality  of 
those  everlasting  arms  that  sustain  defeated 
causes.  The  feeling  that  is  abroad  that  one  may 
afford  the  luxury  of  living  and  dying  for  a  de- 
cency, comes  of  a  perception,  more  or  less  clear, 
that  this  visible  flow  of  things  is  a  kind  of  hier- 
oglyph of  an  eternal  order,  and  that  justice  and 
beauty  written  in  this  wax  are  somehow  graven 
in  an  adamant,  and  so  are  worth  while. 

It  becomes  an  impertinence  to  expatiate  upon 
the  misery  of  the  poor— implying  that  an  evil 
thing  might  stand  if  only  it  were  not  iutolera- 

123 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

ble.  The  right  moment  of  reform  does  not  fall 
at  the  limit  of  endurance.  We  "will  not  be 
ruled  by  sheer,  infidel  necessity;  it  is  enough 
that  the  thing  is  wrong. 

It  is  the  greatness  of  the  age  that  it  is  en- 
grossed in  economics;  that  it  sees  in  tangible 
things  wrought  by  the  labor  of  men,  sacra- 
mental values,  and  the  materials  of  religion. 
This  is  the  beginning  of  a  new  order  of 
things  more  beautiful  and  joyous  than  has 
yet  been  seen  on  the  earth;  for  how  was  it 
possible  to  make  the  earth  glorious  while  the 
poets  and  artists  stood  gazing  into  heaven? 
Now  at  length,  after  thousands  of  years  of  wist- 
ful longings  for  another  world,  there  is  hope 
that  we  may  accept  the  situation  and  take  time 
to  put  the  earth  in  order.  It  is  not  because  this 
earth  is  all,  but  because  it  is  not  all,  and  we 
can  afford  to  be  liberal,  and  because  democ- 
racy has  found  a  standing  ground  in  the  eter- 
nal from  which  it  can  exert  a  tremendous  lever- 
age upon  all  the  old  social  snags. 

To  bring  justice  and  beauty  upon  the  earth 
in  wisdom,  freedom  and  fearlessness  of  death, 
that  is  the  whole  ritual  and  service  of  the  reli- 
gion of  the  incarnation.  Its  theology  is  that  a 
man  is  a  son  of  God,  and  that  his  work  is  world- 
making  as  God's  work  is. 

124 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

VIII.— That  spiritual  power— independent 
and  universal— which  was  the  longing  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  shall  fulfill  itself  in  the  sover- 
eignty of  the  peoples  of  the  world,  focused  in 
the  heart  of  that  people  which  has  most  of  faith 
in  God,  and  is  noost  magnanimous  for  justice. 
This  is  the  plain  vocation  of  the  people  of  the 
United  States;  there  is  to-day  on  the  earth  no 
other  people  that  can  exemplify  on  a  grand  and 
convincing  scale  the  spiritual  and  sacrificial 
principle  of  popular  sovereignty. 

It  is  said  that  the  road  of  territorial  exten- 
sion and  governmental  aggrandizement  would 
be  a  new  departure  for  the  American   people ; 
but  that  is  only  superficially  and  technically 
true.     That  road   is  a  smooth,  easy  declivity, 
trodden  hard  by  all  the  world  before  us,  a  road 
with  whose  trend  we  are  ourselves,  after  all, 
sufficiently  familiar.     The  ideals  that  make  for 
bigness  of  government  and  vastness  of  territory 
are  the  air  we  have  breathed  for  a  generation; 
the  matter  of  the  exact  frontier  limit  is  a  mat- 
ter of  detail,  mainly  interesting  from  the  point 
of  view  of  professional  politics  and  traditional 
consistency.     If  the  old  ideals  were  to  continue 
with  us,  it  would  be  unimportant  whether  or 
not  they  should  be  applied  to  another  island  or 
two.     The  rise  and  fall  of  nations  is  in  the  rise 

125 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

and  fall  of  the  spirit  that  actuates  them,  and  is 
little  affected  by  accidents  of  polity. 

The  matter  of  supreme  interest  to  universal 
history  is  whether  America,  having  come  to 
the  parting  of  the  ways,  shall  choose  according 
to  the  old  world  fatality,  the  greatness  of  a  gov- 
ernment, and  the  expanded  egotism  of  patriotic 
pride  or  shall  choose  in  unprecedented  self- 
denial  the  freedom  of  the  peoples  beyond  her 
boundaries.  The  latter  way,  and  not  the  way 
of  a  greater  government,  is  a  new  departure 
— a  way  fresh  with  the  dew  of  the  world's 
morning,  trodden  by  many  persons  from  time 
to  time,  but  never  yet  by  a  people. 

The  choice  is  exigent.  We  cannot  pause  at 
the  parting  of  the  ways  and  decide  against  both 
alternatives.  In  the  laws  of  morality  every- 
thing moves  for  better  or  worse.  To  settle  back 
as  we  were  is  the  one  thing  utterly  impossible. 
The  test  that  is  to  be  required  of  the  nation  that 
would  be  the  leading  spirit  in  the  moral  empire 
of  democracy  is  that  it  shall  be  willing  to  seem 
less  in  order  that  other  peoples  may  be  more. 

The  rise  of  democracy  as  a  universal  spirit- 
ual power  would  follow  upon  the  rise  of  a  na- 
tion disinterestedly  devoted  to  the  cause  of  lib- 
erty, a  nation  that  should  escape  from  itself,  as 
no  nation  has  yet  done,  and  live  out  into  the 

X2G 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

world.  The  basis  of  self-government  at  last  is 
simply  self-denial,  and  the  universal  spiritual 
power  would  be  established  on  the  day  that  a 
great  nation  should  set  its  face  steadfastly  to- 
ward the  City  of  Sacrificial  Love. 

But  democracy  is  greater  than  any  nation; 
it  may  be  balked,  delayed,  defeated ;  but  it  is 
unconquerable.  The  very  life  of  the  modern 
world  is  in  it,  and  though  to-day  only  the  chil- 
dren should  understand  its  secret  it  would  cer- 
tainly prevail. 

It  may  be  that  the  nation  which  is  to  be  the 
master  spirit  must  be  gathered  out  of  the  whole 
family  of  nations  —  a  kinship  of  justice  and 
equality,  a  comradeship  whose  hands  reach 
round  the  world. 

The  states  grow  hard  and  brittle,  and  the  earth 
growls  small.  The  orhis  terrarum  bounded 
by  the  equator  to-day  is  smaller  and  easier  to 
compass  than  it  was  when  it  surrounded  only 
the  Mediterranean  lake.  The  difficulty  is  not  to 
compass  it.  When  the  whole  earth  pays  tribute 
to  one's  daily  meals  it  is  hard  to  keep  up  the 
parochial  illusions.  The  endeavor  to  consider 
the  affairs  of  one  country  without  reference  to 
the  affairs  of  other  countries  becomes  a  labored 
abstraction,  and  a  kind  of  trifling. 

Certainly  there  is  not  a  fence  in  the  world 

127 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

that  will  staod  much  pressure.  Commerce  is 
on  the  side  of  universal  democracy,  and  it  is 
irresistible  in  the  long  run,  and  will  not  miud  a 
custom  or  a  prejudice  any  more  than  the  tide  will 
mind  a  king.  By  and  by,  after  the  boundar  es 
have  ceased  to  serve  the  money-lords  and  men 
of  bonds,  who  dominate  the  councils  of  what  is 
called  the  Concert  of  Powers,  these  will  pool 
their  interests  and  wipe  out,  all  the  frontiers — 
unless  the  people  shall  have  arrived  before 
them,  and  destroyed  the  boundaries  for  other 
purposes.  Everywhere  the  hearts  of  the  people 
are  achiijg  with  the  expectation  of  release  and 
liberty;  the  way  is  prepared  for  the  apostolate 
of  the  religion  of  democracy;  it  cannot  be  long 
before  its  priestless  temples  shall  rise. 

IX. — It  is  not  that  we  are  to  look  forward  to 
a  finished  and  perfect  social  order.  Perfection 
is  a  hope  that  all  nature  exists  to  discourage; 
and  the  charm  of  a  beautiful  thing  or  of  a  just 
deed  is  that  it  is  of  infinite  suggestion  and  eas- 
ily transcends  itself — leading  one  on  and  on. 

What  may  be  said  of  the  religion  of  the  incar- 
nation is  not  that  it  will  change  the  world  to 
happiness  in  a  day,  but  that  it  will  defeat  the 
tendency  to  collapse  and  drav;  the  world  out  of 
that  endless,  desperate  cycle  of  glory  and  decay 

128 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

which  hitherto  has  claimed  the  nations  like  a 
fate,  and  tumbled  all  the  clond-piercing  Bahel- 
towers  in  the  dust;  and  that  it  will  lay  inde- 
structible foundations  for  a  civilization  of  im- 
measurable and  endless  improvement. 

The  death  of  nations  is  in  morbid  ideality,  an 
ideality  that  feeds  upon  itself  and  forgets  to 
live.  The  aristocracies  perish  because  they  be- 
come self-cultivating  and  cease  to  be  creative, 
and  the  governments  are  overthrown  because 
they  dream  of  empire  and  neglect  the  common, 
economic  facts. 

The  religions  of  the  world  in  general  have  af- 
forded no  availing  remedy  for  this  bathos  of 
history,  this  chronic  tendency  to  anticlimax, 
but  have  often  tended  rather  to  precipitate  dis- 
aster. At  times  they  have  seemed  to  infect  the 
earth  like  virulent  diseases,  because  they  have 
spent  themselves  in  stimulating  their  devotees  in 
spiritual  culture  and  have  despised  art  and  re- 
form. The  unanimous  persuasion  of  the  spir- 
itual specialists  of  every  age  and  country  that 
God  is  all  in  all,  and  is  therefore  exclusively 
responsible  for  things  as  they  are,  has  been  the 
assurance  of  the  fatalism  of  the  privileged 
classes,  and  has  done  more  than  the  lusts  of 
the  flesh  to  discourage  repentance  and  prepare 
the  great  social  calamities. 

129 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

To  be  sure  it  has  been  the  usual  teaching  of 
these  specialists  that  religion  includes  ethics 
and  requires  that  a  man  shall  do  right.  But 
since  this  right  has  been  systematically  distin- 
guished from  the  mere  candid  promptings  of 
an  unsophisticated  mind,  and  has  alwaj's  been 
referred  back  to  the  will  of  God ;  and  since  the 
will  of  God  is,  by  the  premises,  mainly  to  be 
gathered  from  the  established  order,  it  becomes 
difficult  to  escape  from  the  vicious  circle,  and 
difficult  to  find  in  what  goes  by  the  name  of 
ethics  a  standing  ground  from  which  to  execute 
reform. 

Conceivably  the  world  might  have  escaped 
from  this  fatal  round  by  the  use  of  prayer.  It 
might  have  been  God's  way  to  furnish  to  such 
as  should  applj'^specific  intimations  and  detailed 
designs  of  what  a  man  should  do — or  he  might 
at  least  have  provided  the  priests  wnth  such  pat- 
terns, to  be  by  them  given  out  in  piecework  to 
the  faithful.  Men  have  had  such  hopes; 
church  polities  have  been  built  upon  them,  a^:id 
doubtless  there  are  many  pious  people  that  ex- 
pect their  daily  messages,  and  perhaps  receive 
them.  Yet  it  is  evident  that,  in  general,  the 
sanest  saints  do  not  expect  them,  and  that  for 
the  ordinary  run  of  things  God  does  not  furnish 
men  with  diagrams  of  duty.  It  is  clear  that,  in 

130 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

the  main,  He  has  thrown  the  world  upon  its 
own  conscience,  and  that  He  is  not,  and  will 
not  be,  all  in  all. 

Of  course  the  vast  perversions  of  religion  are 
not  to  be  attributed  wholly,  or  even  principally, 
to  the  priests;  and  it  is  to  be  borne  in  mind  that 
even  in  the  most  perverted  religions  there  has 
always  been  an  unpriestly  element  of  simple 
love  and  joy,  and  the  desire  for  what  is  beauti- 
ful. But  the  general  account  of  all  the  priestly 
establishments,  so  far  as  they  have  been  priest- 
ly, is  that  they  have  been  the  institutionaliza-  - 
tions  of  the  faithlessness  of  men,  in  view  of  the 
practical  difficulties  of  living. 

At  their  best  they  have  furnished  consola- 
tions for  the  lack  of  faith,  and  at  their  worst 
they  have  provided  systematic  devices  for  doing 
away  with  the  felt  need  of  it.  If  one  would  but 
believe  something  a  little  hard  to  credit,  or  do 
something  a  little  hard  to  do,  accept  a  creed, 
burn  an  offering  or  buy  an  indulgance,  nothing 
else  should  be  required  and  the  sacrifice  should 
be  accounted  faith. 

The  theory  that  a  man  may  save  his  soul  by 
accepting  an  incomprehensible  proposition  in 
divinity  is  not  Protestantism,  but  a  poisoning 
of  the  wells  of  Protestantism.  And  scarcely 
i^incQ  the  world  began   has  orthodozy  for  oi^e 

131 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

moment  made  common  cause  with  faith,  or 
struck  with  her  a  single  venturesome  blow  for 
love  and  justice. 

X. — Over  against  the  rabble  and  jargon  of 
what  are  called  the  religious  faiths,  democracy 
lifts  up  its  voice  for  faith.  The  faiths  with 
their  stubborn  theologies,  their  forbidding  sac- 
raments and  their  special  unctions,  are  con- 
victed of  intellectual  vanity  and  spiritual  pride; 
they  build  partition  walls,  foment  discords,  and 
excomm.unicate  souls;  but  faith  excludes  no 
one.  Faith  can  transcend  all  the  boundaries 
of  races,  nations,  classes,  sects,  and  find  terms 
of  expression  for  the  oneness  of  human  interests 
— the  vast  orderliness  of  the  moral  universe. 

XL — Pass  around  the  world  at  night  over  the 
sleeping  cities  and  the  wide,  silent  lands — New 
York,  Chicago,  Pekin,  Calcutta,  Paris,  the 
farms,  the  innumerable  dwellings  scattered  over 
the  steppes  and  prairies;  note  the  pause  and 
suspense,  the  prostration  of  myriads  of  souls. 
This  is  the  immemorial  common  prayer,  the  old- 
est ritual  of  faith,  the  original  and  universal 
sacrament.  Dreams  are  the  distemper  of  sleep, 
but  the  subconscious  deeps  of  it  are,  it  would 
seem,  the  recuperation  of  faith  and  the  intimacy 

132 


The  Relis'ion  of  Democracv^ 


& 


of  God.  Out  of  sleep  the  timeless  man  comes 
forth  into  time  to  accomplish  the  incarnation. 
The  program  of  valiant  enterprise  is  to  do  what 
seems  good  in  the  morning,  and  the  perfection  of 
faith  is  an  utter  confidence  in  the  resources  that 
are  withdrawn  behind  the  veil  of  sleep  and 
death. 

The  illusion  of  culture  and  pride  is  that  sleep 
is  the  weakness  and  death  the  overthrow  of 
life;  but  the  discovery  of  humility  and  faith  is 
that  sleep  and  death  are  the  ground  in  which 
life  grows. 

Day  by  day,  sunward,  in  vast  procession — 
yet  each  going  alone — the  millions  of  the  world 
pass  through  the  gates  of  sleep  into  the  universal 
sanctuary.  Herein  is  a  catholic  communion 
without  schism  ,  under  this  serene  dome  are  no 
divisions  of  interest. 

Day  by  day,  a  universal  spiritual  concord  is 
typed  in  the  unanimity  of  deep,  dispassionate 
sleep.  The  day  comes  and  the  day's  work  is 
to  press  upon  the  striving,  conscious  world,  the 
fulfillment  of  this  prophecy,  to  cast  into  con- 
crete images,  wrought  in  the  stuff  of  nature,  the 
cool,  sane  promptings  of  receptive  sleep. 


133 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

THE  CASTE  OF  GOODNESS. 

I. — The  modern  man  is  standing  at  a  point 
of  view  from  which  it  would  seem  to  be  possi- 
ble for  the  simplest  to  see  that  the  dream  of  the 
yonth  of  Lamennais,  the  dream  of  Pope  Leo 
XIIL,  is  indeed  a  dream.  Democracy  cannot 
make  terms  with  any  kind  of  ecclesiastical 
trust  or  spiritual  monopoly.  The  life  of  Lamen- 
nais is  a  tragic  demonstration  of  this  impossi- 
bility as  his  "Book  of  the  People"  and  *'Words 
of  a  Believer"  are  among  the  earliest  disclos- 
ures of  the  spiritual  meaning  of  democracy. 

It  is  said  in  Europe  that  the  Pope  has  canon- 
ized democracy,  but  it  is  a  one-sided  wooing; 
democracj"  will  never  canonize  the  Pope.  Yet 
it  salutes  in  him  the  most  consistent  represent- 
ative of  the  old  regime — the  hero  of  the  dying 
world. 

The  Roman  Church  as  an  institution  and 
reasoned  system  antagonizes  at  every  point  the 

134 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

witness  cf  the  modern  spirit.  Rome  is  fatalist, 
skaptic  and  pessimist  clear  through — except  for 
glorious  miracles.  Modernity,  with  its  matter- 
of-fact  assurance  that  a  man  does  really  choose 
his  way  and  achieve  his  own  designs,  its  confi- 
dence in  the  possibility  of  science  and  its  fixed 
persuasion  that  it  is  a  good  thing  to  be  alive  on 
any  terms  whatever,  turns  away  from  Rome 
with  a  shrug,  and  does  not  stop  to  argue.  As 
for  the  multitudinous  Protestant  and  sectarian 
churches  they  are  things  of  incredible  mys- 
tification, having  but  one  aspect  in  common— a 
genius  for  compromise  and  self-contradiction. 
It  is  true  that  the  inner  spirit  of  Protestantism 
is  nothing  other  than  the  modern  spirit;  but 
Protestant  ecclesiasticism  a^  it  stands  is  a  jun- 
gle of  impossibilities — a  disastrous  attempt  to 
put  new  wine  into  old  bottles.  Protestantism 
has  shone  clear  and  illustrious  only  in  those 
times  when  for  a  moment  it  has  forgotten  its 
corporate  privileges  and  launched  itself  boldly 
into  the  secular  world — as  in  the  rise  of  the 
Dutch  Republic,  or  the  planting  of  the  New 
England  colonies.  For  the  destruction  of 
spiritual  monopolies  is  the  logic  of  Protestant 
ism,  whereunto  it  is  pressed  by  an  irresistible 
necessity. 


135 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

II. —The  mediaeval  Church  is  the  placenta 
of  the  modern  world.  It  has  been  indispensa- 
ble to  the  generation  of  the  new  social  order, 
but  it  becomes  noisome  and  an  offence  with  the 
birth  of  the  modern  and  spiritual  conception 
of  secular  society.  Within  the  body  of  the 
Roman  Empire,  whose  law  was  fatalism,  skep- 
ticism and  pessimism  reduced  to  system  and 
statute,  the  ancient  Church  was  formed— out  of 
Roman  and  imperial  materials,  to  hold  the 
germ  of  modernity — the  principle  that  a  man 
may  be  the  son  of  God. 

Back  of  the  blank  negations  of  the  Roman 
civilization  there  lay  a  long  history  of  moral 
discomfiture.  Rome  was  the  ordered  embodi- 
ment of  the  disappointment  of  Greek  liberty 
and  culture— the  stubborn  desperation  of  the 
self-made  man.  It  is  to  be  noted  that  Greek 
liberty  could  stand  without  self-contradiction 
o?  a  qualm,  face  to  face  with  chattel  slavery, 
modern  liberty  cannot  do  that.  This  marks  a 
world-wide  distinction  between  two  different 
things.  The  ground  of  the  former  was  in  tem- 
poral circumstances,  the  ground  of  the  latter  is 
in  the  eternal  constitution  of  the  soul.  Liberty 
to  the  Greek  was  an  accomplishment;  to  the 
modern  man  it  is  a  primordial  right.  There  is 
a  Stoic  saying  that  a  brave  man  is  in  a  way 

136 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

superior  to  God,  for  God  owes  it  to  his  mere 
nature  that  He  is  not  afraid,  but  man  to  bis 
own  acbieTement.  Such  a  saying  might  stand 
as  a  symbol  of  the  top-loftiness,  the  moral  gid- 
diness and  the  predestined  failure  of  that  lib- 
erty and  culture  of  Greece  upon  the  ruin  of 
which  Rome  laid  out  her  flinty  roads,  and  de- 
ployed her  legions. 

Rome  had  settled  it  that  after  all  a  man  was 
but  a  man — chair  a  plaisir  et  chair  a  canon. 
But  in  the  body  of  this  death  and  discourage- 
ment, the  Roman  Church  was  a  thing  formed 
out  of  the  substance  of  the  dying  to  gestate  the 
soul  of  the  modern  world.  For  the  soul  of  the 
modern  world  is  the  idea  of  liberty,  not  as  some- 
thing to  be  accomplished  at  the  end  of  life,  but 
somethiug  to  be  claimed  in  the  beginning,  de- 
spite adverse  possessions  and  every  vested  inter- 
est—the idea  of  inalienable  rights  and  the  mys- 
tery and  awe  of  a  co-creatorship  with  God,  and 
a  joint  responsibility.  The  Church  was  the 
stuff  of  the  old  social  regime  impregnated  with 
the  miracle  of  the  divinity  of  a  man — a  marvel 
which  contains  the  promise  and  prophecy  of 
that  universality  or  the  miraculous,  or  univer- 
sality of  moral  freedom,  which  is  the  religion 
of  democracy  and  in  the  realization  of  which 
both  the  old  social  order  and  the  ancient  Church 
are  now  to  pass  away. 

137 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

That  the  Church  in  its  historical  conception 
cannot  be  the  embodiment  of  the  Holy  Spirit  of 
Emancipation  or  its  perpetual  vehicle,  that  it 
is,  and  must  be  in  the  nature  of  things  only  a 
scaffolding  destined  to  be  destroyed,  grows  day 
by  day  more  evident.  The  vertigo  and  motor- 
paralysis  of  the  Protestant  churches,  their  in- 
ability to  move,  even  by  the  smallest  advances 
toward  that  church -unity,  'for  which  they  so 
imanimously  pray — this  spectacle  is  the  tinal 
exhibit  of  the  proof  that  Protestantism  and  the 
Protestant  churches  are  contradictory  terms. 
The  only  unity,  of  any  hope  or  any  value,  is  to 
be  sought  out  in  the  open  air  of  common  secu- 
larity.  The  sectarian  church  that  would  be 
most  forward  to  the  goal  of  the  unity  and  com- 
pany of  faithful  men,  must  make  auto-da-fe 
of  everything  that  makes  it  a  spiritually  priv- 
ileged corporation  must  strive,  and  be  shriven 
of  every  note  and  character,  of  every  habit  of 
mind  and  posture  of  soul  that  belongs  to  the 
caste  of  goodness  and  the  tradition  of  a  dying 
world.  Into  the  fire  of  the  sacrifice  must  go  not 
only  the  hierarchical  pretensions,  and  the  fond 
imaginations  of  sacramentalism,  but  also  the 
V  caput  mortum  of  Hellenic  theology,  the  intellec- 
tual vagaries  of  liberalism,  and  a  thousand 
other  ancient  follies  and  clerical  conceits;  for  ail 

138. 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

these  things  are  of  the  hody,  and  quality  of  the 
ancient  Church,  and  must  pass  with  the  pass- 
ing of  the  old  world  to  which  that  Church  be- 
longs. 

Ill  _The  Church  as  it  stands  to-day  is  not 
merely  a  cumberer  of  the  ground;  it  is  an  ob- 
stacle to  faith,  and  a  preventer  of  goodness.  Its 
smoking  lamps  make  the  darkness  murky,  and 
its  weakness  and    incompetency  grow  to  what 
is  worse.     It  obscures  the  spiritual  aim   of  de- 
mocracy, reduces  liberty  to   a  sentiment  and 
equality  and  fraternity  to  an  affected  fellow- 
ship or  a  mutual  benefit.     Its  envious  and  pal- 
try divisions  thwart  the  hope  of  social  unanim- 
ity it  precipitates  a  crystallization  of   society 
in  terms  of  emotion,  intellect   and  taste,  and  so 
scatters  the  conscience  and  paralyzes  the  will. 

The   Church   was  the  bearer  of  faith   only 
so  long  as  it  remained  inknit  in  the  very  body 
and  texture  of  the  old  secular  society.     When 
faith  grew  up  out  of  the  old  world  and  took  the 
field  in  the  struggle  fur   civil  liberty,   it  was 
commissioned  to  become  the  informing  and  all- 
penetrating  power  of  a  new  world,  and  there 
was  no  longer  any  moral  meaning  in  the  ancient 
ecclesiastical  system.     It  served  only  to  encyst 
the  principle  of  faith  and  keep  it  out  of  the  gen- 

139 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

eral  circulation.  The  Church  became  a  rival 
and  a  hindrance  to  the  spiritual  common- 
wealth. 

Before  that  broadening  of  the  horizon  that 
came  with  the  Renaissance  and  the  Reforma- 
tion, the  Church's  ordered   scheme  of  special 
miracles  shone  as  an  open  rift  in  the  black 
dome  of  fate  that  had   settled  down  upon  the 
ancient  world.     The  miracles   of  the  Church 
were  a  standing  witness  to  the  liberty  of  the 
spirit  in  the  midst  of  a  world  of  immutable  and 
cruel  law.     Its   very    superstitions    and    ex- 
cesses were  as  a  corrosion  of  the  hard  armor  of 
the  old  fatalism,  skepticism  and  pessimism,  and 
there  was  no  anchorite,  or  cenobite,  no  pilgrim 
or  palmer,  that  did  not  pay  tribute  to  the  mod- 
ern world,  and  serve  the  cause  of  liberty.     But 
the  time  came   when  the   Christian   program, 
as  represented  by  the  Church,  became  no  longer 
credible.     Its  stubborn  assertion  of  an  outworn 
theory  became  a  denial  of  conceptions  that  were 
infinitely  more   inspiring   as  they  were   more 
easy  to  understand.     A  profounder  moral  expe- 
rience and  a  larger  synthesis  brought  men  to  a 
pass  where  they  must  either  conceive  the  whole 
world  as  instinct  with  miraculous  freedom,  or 
else  must  altogether  deny  the  possibilty  of  free- 
dom and  sink  back  into  the  old  despair.     The 

140 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

arrival  at  this  juncture  was  the  signal  for  what 
is  called  the  Reformation,  which  should  have 
been  much  more  than  a  reformation,  and  would 
have  been  if  the  reformers  had  believed  a  little 
more  in  their  mission  and  kept  close  to  their  in- 
spirations. The  plain  logic  of  "private  judg- 
ment" and  ** justification  by  faith"  was  the 
complete  discrediting  of  all  established  spirit- 
ual oracles  and  the  effacement  of  the  ancient 
corporate  Church.  If  the  old  Church  system 
was  only  corrupt  and  needed  healing,  the  Ref- 
ormation was  the  greatest  crime  in  history, 
and  the  reformers  were  indeed,  as  the  Roman 
historians  say,  very  devils  of  discord.  The  Ref- 
ormation is  justified  only  as  being  in  spirit 
and  intent  a  revolution  and  the  putting  away 
of  a  dead  thing.  The  social  convulsions  that 
followed,  the  moral  welter  and  confusion,  the 
age-long  harassment  of  sectarian  rivalries,  the 
fierce,  intestine  wars,  the  brooding  pestilence 
of  cant  and  the  belittling  of  God — these  things 
came  of  the  Reformation,  not  because  it  was 
wrong  but  because  it  was  not  thorough;  it 
left  the  people  still  looking  for  a  privileged  cor- 
poration. The  new  presbyters  were  the  old 
priests,  after  all,  and  their  affirmation  of  the 
lesser  creed  became  the  denial  of  the  greater. 
The  faith  of  the  Protestant  churches  mocked 

141 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

the  faith  of  the  modern  world.  For  more  than 
four  hundred  years  they  have  been  minimizing 
their  professions,  with  the  fission  of  their  bod- 
ies, until  now  they  are  incredible  because  they 
claim  so  little.  Their  demands  upon  the  confi- 
dence of  men  have  reached  the  most  tenuous 
extreme.  Their  faith  verges  to  infidelity,  and 
the  people  turn  doubting  from  their  altars  to 
cheer  in  the  streets  the  name  of  Jesus. 

IV.— The  simple  truth  is  that  the  churches 
are  in  danger  of  forgetting  the  very  meaning 
of  faith.     What  they  now  call  by  that  name  is 
for  the  most  part  not  faith  at  all.    If  other  than 
a  hereditary  prejudice  or  a  social  concession,  it 
is  a  persuasion  that  comes  at  the  end  of  an  ar- 
gument, or  a  feeling  that  follows  an  emotional 
stir.     Faith  could  abide  in  the  Church  only  so 
long  as  it  took  its  church  for  granted ;  when  the 
Church  became  itself  an  object  of  faith,  faith 
was  turned  to  a  philosophy,  or  an  infatuation. 
When  the  Church  ceased  to  be  in  some  sense 
coterminous  with  secular  society,  it  lost  the  one 
thing  of  value  that  it  contained— lost  the  origi- 
nality and  ingenuousness  of  faith — lost  the  kind 
of  faith  that  forgets  itself  and  removes  moun- 
tains by  intending  heart  and  mind  upon  the 
mountains,  the  faith  of  the  Maid  of  Orleans 

14^ 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

ftnd  St.  Francis  of  Assisi,  which  is  precisely 
the  most  modern  and  democratic  kind.  The 
faith  of  a  sectarian  church— in  which  description 
Rome,  as  represented  in  the  modern  world,  must 
certainly  be  included— is  but  the  ritual  of  a  cult, 
the  shibboleth  of  a  pious  caste,  or  the  philosophy 

of  a  school.  — 

The  faith  that  is  an  adventure  of  the  soul, 
and  an  originating  moral  energy  can  get  no 
gain  or   succor  from   the  sectarian   churches. 
The   genetic   kind   of  faith  which   is  the  very 
breath  of  the  modern  spirit,  which  is  the  spring 
of  science  and  of  humanizing  enterprise,  which 
believes  in  spite  of  doubt,  that  this  unintelligi- 
ble world  is  at  bottom  reasonable,  confronting 
the  antagonisms  of  classes  and  nations  with  a 
fixed  assurance  that  there  is  a  justice  that  is 
best   for   all,  making  the  strong  the  willing 
slaves  of  the  weak,  and  convincing  the  people 
of  the  equality  of  souls— the  faith  that  is  pre- 
paring the  triumph  of  democracy,  creating  a 
new  and   inspiring  literature  and  clearing  the 
way  for  a  commerce  that  shall  claim  the  mar- 
kets for  the  man— this  faith  is  not  bred  in  sec- 

taiian  churches. 

And  no  reform  of  the  sects  will  avail  to  pro- 
duce such  faith,  no  revival  of  their  spirits,  no 
purification,  disinfection  or  purgation.  The 
'  143 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

quickeDing  of  the  desire  to  improve  their  spir- 
itual condition  would  but  intensify  the  evil.  It 
is  necessary  to  unchurch  the  churches  before 
they  can  serve  the  common  cause  of  souls. 
Their  existence  is  a  contradiction,  and  their 
safet}^  is  to  turn  against  themeslves. 


144 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

THE    RISE    OF    A    DEMOCRATIC    CATHOLIC 

CHURCH. 

I.— The  religious  trusts  are  bankrupt,  and 
the  caste  of  good-ness  and  truth  is  ripe  for  dis- 
solution; but  the  Church  in  its  original  char- 
ter rises  to  the  emergency  of  the  world.     The 
societies  founded   in   particularism,    exclusion 
and  monopoly  give  place  to  a  Catholic  Church 
founded  in  the  universal  and  the  eternal,  and  in 
the  essential  and  permanent  characteristics  of 
the  human  spirit.  The  churches  of  the  past  have 
been   only  types  and   symbols  foreshowing— 
sometimes  in   glorious  and  inspiring  parable, 
sometimes  in  distorted  and  monstrous  carica- 
ture—the   Church    catholic    and    democratic 
which  is  to  comprehend  the  design  of  the  uni- 
versal  spiritual   revolution   and  establish   the 
people  in  the  beginnings  of  liberty.    It  has  taken 
nearly  nineteen  hundred  years  for  a  cathoxic 
church  to  become  a  possibility. 

Catholicism  is  the  taking  in  of  the  last  man 

145 


-Vr 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

with  confidence  that  for  him,  too,  as  well  as  for 
the  rest,  life  has  meaniog  and  is  reasonable;  it 
is  the  taking  in  of  the  whole  cosmos  with  confi- 
dence that  it  is  all  of  one  piece  and  hangs  to- 
gether to  the  last  detail;  it  is  the  taking  in  of 
every  human  interest  of  body  and  soul  in  faith 
that  the  base  and  servile  can  be  subdued  to  lib- 
erty, art  and  joy,  and  finally  it  is  the  embrac- 
ing of  all  the  ages  in  the  belief  that  they  have 
mutual  and  independent  significance  and  a  cum- 
ulative purpose.  One  has  but  to  turn  the 
pages  of  history  with  the  most  casual  hand  to 
perceive  that  the  conception  of  such  a  Catholi- 
cism was  impossible  to  any  of  the  ages  that 
have  gone  by;  while  the  most  cursory  survey  of 
the  contemporary  world  will  show  that  such  a 
Catholicism  is  both  the  passion  and  the  convic- 
tion of  the  age  in  which  we  live. 

The  Church  that  is  in  the  making  transcends 
every  human  device  and  institution ;  its  estab- 
lishment is  not  in  the  imagination  and  inven- 
tion of  men,  but  in  the  reality  and  persistence 
of  God.  The  Churches  of  the  past  have  gener- 
ally professed  a  superhuman  constitution.  But 
it  is  evident  that  they  have,  without  exception, 
sprung  out  of  limited  and  mortal  ideas,  since 
they  have  scattered  the  people,  rejected  or  ig- 
nored the  expanding  vision  of  the  world,  sepa- 

146 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

rated  the  sacred  from  the  secular,  and  broken 
the  continuity  of  the  ages.  At  last,  after  many 
failures  of  pride  and  the  discrediting  of  innu- 
merable theories,  the  divine  and  royal  humility 
is  compelling  its  lesson  upon  the  hearts  of  men. 
There  will  arise  a  Church  that  is  not  the  prod- 
uct of  a  theory,  but  that  grows  out  of  the  liv- 
ing presence  of  God— resting  not  upon  special 
revelations  or  particular  ideas,  but  upon  the 
axioms  of  faith. 

The  Churches  of  the  past  might  conceivably 
have  been  the  inventions  of  priests  and  princes; 
it  is  possible  to  imagine  that  they  might  have 
existed  even  though  there  were  no  God.  But 
the  Church  of  the  modern  expectation  is 
frankly  impossible  if  there  be  no  God.  It  is 
possible  for  men  to  get  together  on  the  basis  of 
a  sacramental  theory  or  a  proposition  in  divin- 
ity, whether  the  theory  or  the  proposition  be 
true  or  false;  but  it  is  not  possible  for  men 
to  get  together  on  the  ground  of  the  eternal 
reasonableness  and  justice,  unless  indeed 
there  be  an  eternal  Reasonableness  and  Jus- 
tice to  whom  they  all  alike  have  access. 
The  religion  of  democracy  is  effacing  the 
guide-lines  and  diagrams  of  traditional  au- 
thority, committing  to  oblivion  the  ground 
plans  of  the  ancient  Churches.     Therein  it  in- 

147 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

curs  a  fearful  and  magnificent  risk.  If 
God  does  not  exist,  the  result  of  ifc  all  can  be 
only  weltering  anarchy  and  the  ruin  of  the 
world.  On  the  other  hand,  if  God  be  real,  we 
shall  now  behold  unveiled  the  demonstration  of 
His  undeniable  glory. 

II.  The  ecclesiology  of  a  democratic  Catholi- 
cism is  the  ultimate  form  of  social  organization. 
The  Church  is  to  stand  as  the  ecumenical  de- 
mocracy, the  international  republic  of  humani- 
ty in  the  day  when  the  superstition  of  State  sov- 
ereignty shall  become  incredible  and  the  huge, 
meaningless  political  aggregates  shall  lose  their 
strength.  The  strength  of  the  wrangling  em- 
pires is  in  their  mutual  jealousy  and  fear — a 
relic  of  the  feudal  tradition  and  the  old  ethnic 
isolation.  Commerce  and  communication  are 
steadily  relaxing  the  sinews  of  international 
war.  Already  the  profounder  antagonisms  are 
not  those  that  separate  nations,  but  those  that 
separate  classes.  Men  are  drawn  together  in 
these  days  not  by  the  blood- bond,  but  by  una- 
nimity in  ideals;  as  the  new  social  order  is 
born  not  of  the  flesh  but  of  tbe  spirit.  The 
hulks  of  empire  may  rot  by  the  sea  for  a  time, 
but  the  life  and  motion  will  go  out  of  them 
with  the  rise  of  the  tide  of  catholic  democracy. 

148 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

The  Church  is  the  people  organized  in  lib- 
erty. Its  motive  and  design  is  the  constitution 
of  a  universal  society  in  unconstrained  equal- 
ity, the  creation  of  a  world-wide  civilization  in 
the  spirit  of  art— in  a  word,  it  is  the  realization 
in  the  flesh  of  the  Eternal  Life.  Surely,  in 
such  an  enterprise  the  sword  of  State  must  bear 
a  subordinate  and  diminishing  part. 

The  law  of  the  State  is  static;  it  is  merely 
provisional  and  conservative— it  is  not  fit  for  art 
or  for  any  high  and  venturesome  enterprise  or  en- 
deavor. Half  the  cruelties  of  history  have 
come  of  a  monstrous  and  abnormal  knight- 
errantry  of  governments.  The  sword  is  good 
for  pruning,  but  it  cannot  make  things  grow. 

The  State  is  the  disciplinary  arm  of  the 
Church ;  regarded  as  an  end  in  itself,  or  as  an 
object  of  devotion,  it  is  an  imposture  and  a  de- 
lusion. The  use  of  government  is  to  furnish 
certain  of  the  mechanical  and  material  condi- 
tions for  the  growth  of  art  and  the  humanities; 
and  this  work  it  can  faithfully  and  effectually 
do  only  when  it  shall  be  strictly  subordinated 
to  the  superior  and  wider  social  organization 
representative  of  the  uncompelled  ambitions 
and  devotions  of  the  people. 

Governments  to  be  strong  must  be  not  large 
but  small  in  extent  of  territorial  jurisdiction. 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

The  success  aud  progress  of  governments  in 
this  generation  has  been  mainly  limited  to  mu- 
nicipalities. The  ideal  and  poetic  aspiration 
of  the  new  century  will  express  itself  in  the  cre- 
ation of  splendid  and  cosmopolitan  cities,  the 
soul  of  which  shall  be  the  Universal  Church. 
The  tendency  of  the  current  of  imperialism  is 
to  parochialize  the  universe — to  make  the 
whole  earth  Slav  or  Saxon,  on  the  pattern  of 
the  village  commune  or  the  town  meeting. 
The  promise  of  Catholicism  is  the  opposite  of 
that.  It  would  universalize  the  parish,  bring- 
ing the  All  of  things  to  bear  upon  the  local  and 
provincial — planting  the  universitj^  at  every 
crossroads. 

The  Church  will  have  institutions  and  archi- 
tecture. It  will  convert  the  old  cathedrals  and 
build  new  ones.  The  great  things  of  mediae- 
val Catholicism  were  for  the  future;  the  cathe- 
dral that  was  a  forum  of  public  meeting,  a  gal- 
lerj^  of  arts,  a  guildhall  of  handicrafts,  a  school 
of  letters,  and  a  possession  of  everybody — 
prophesied  of  democracy.  And  with  the  awa- 
kening of  the  European  peoples  it  is  certain  that 
those  glorious  buildings,  fallen  now  into 
mournful  abstraction,  shall  be  reclaimed  by  the 
artists  and  the  workers,  and  redeemed  to  the 
living  world.     It  is  not  less  to  be  expected  that 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

the  cathedrals  of  Europe  will  yield  suggestion 
for  other  and  different  fanes  and  minsters  in 
Western  lands,  buildings  which  will  he  naaied 
not  for  the  seat  of  a  bishop,  but  for  the  standard 
of  a  people— each  a  pledge  of  hospitality  for  all 
travelers,  a  shrine  and  statehouse  of  democracy 
and  a  nerve  center  of  civilization. 

III. — All  things  grow  from  the  seed— noth- 
ing is  created  out  of  nothing.  The  future  comes 
out  of  the  past,  and  the  seed  is  not  quickened 
except  it  die.  The  new  Church  will  come  out 
of  the  old  Church,  when  the  seed  is  ready  for 
the  furrow — when  a  little  podded  sect  stands 
ready  in  its  heart  to  die. 

Three  notes  and  signs,  which  characterize — 
yes,  constitute— the  existing  sects,  will  charac- 
terize and  constitute  the  Church  of  the  future 
by  their  unprecedented  absence.  The  three  es- 
sential notes  of  a  sect  are  the  attempted  estab- 
lishment of  the  sacred  in  separation  from  the 
secular,  of  good  people  in  separation  from  bad 
people,  and  of  true  propositions  in  separation 
from  false.  The  rise  of  the  new  Catholicism  is 
in  the  dawning  conviction  that  these  distinc- 
tions, in  so  far  as  they  are  pregnant  and  fruit- 
ful, are  self -vindicatory,  and  do  not  need  to  be 
institutionalized  or  established.     The  risk  of 


x«^. 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

losing  the  eternal  things  in  the  temporal  things, 
of  contaminating  the  good  by  the  touch  of  the 
evil,  of  missing  the  reality  through  too  earnest 
a  regard  of  the  phenomenon — this  is  the  intrin- 
sic and  inevitable  risk  of  faith,  the  trial  and 
task  of  those  who  would  live  in  the  real  world 
and  build  the  City  of  the  Soul.  It  is  the  faith 
of  the  religion  of  the  Incarnation  that  the  risks 
are  not  losses ;  that  it  is  good  to  break  the  bar- 
riers and  live  out  dangerously  into  the  world. 

The  Church  shall  discover  the  eternal  in  the 
flesh.  It  shall  understand  that  civilization  is 
the  sum  of  all  sacraments  and  the  supreme  and 
most  intimate  test  of  the  spirits  of  men.  It 
shall  see  in  the  problem  of  labor  and  bread  the 
involute  of  every  spiritual  and  eternal  issue. 
The  Church  shall  engross  itself  in  materials,  in 
the  humanities,  the  courtesies  and  the  arts. 
It  shall  work  a  new  orientation  of  the  com- 
mon law,  shifting  the  legal  point  of  view  from 
property  to  persons,  destroying  the  fetish  of 
capital  and  denying  the  capitalist  a  hearing 
save  as  a  member  of  the  fraternity  of  work. 

It  shall  be  disclosed  that  God  has  so  framed 
this  tangible  world  that  it  will  respond  only  to 
the  communion  and  unanimity  of  men — balking 
and  confusing  all  science  and  art,  all  labor  and 
commerce  save  such  as  is  accomplished  in  love 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

and  faith.  The  building  of  the  world-city  will 
be  seen  to  be  the  goal  of  history — unattainable 
save  through  mighty  regenerations  and  re- 
demptions. The  nations  hitherto  have  been  the 
serfs  of  nature,  ascirpti  glebce,  thralled  and 
cumbered  in  the  clod.  The  earth  has  possessed 
the  people,  and  history  has  been  mainly  a  gloss 
upon  economics.  The  program  of  the  new  era 
is  to  put  the  people  in  possession  of  the  earth — 
to  put  the  whole  people  in  possession  of  the 
whole  earth. 

So  much  for  the  first  note  of  the  resurgent 
Church — its  sacred  and  eternal  secularity. 

Secondly,  the  Church  will  utterly  shatter  the 
caste  of  goodness  and  definitely  abandon  the  at- 
tempt to  mark  a  distinction  between  good  per- 
sons and  the  bad.  Its  sacraments  must  be  of- 
fered to  all  the  humble  and  child-hearted  with- 
out any  kind  of  stipulation  of  conformity  or 
faintest  implication  of  special  sanctity.  The 
Church  will  refuse  to  exercise  what  is  called 
spiritual  discipline,  and  it  will  jealously  guard 
its  offices  from  the  imputation  of  being  particu- 
larly pious. 

For  to  be  particularly  pious  is  not  merely 
Pharisaic,  it  is  flat  paganism;  it  savors  of 
the  siege  of  Troy  and  the  platitudes  of  Greek 
philosophers;  it  is  flying  in  the  face  of  Chris- 

153 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

tianity  and  making  the  clergy  and  all  the  com- 
municants a  jest. 

According  to  Christianity,  goodness  is  not  a 
thing  for  which  a  man  ought  to  be  publicly 
marked  and  praised,  but  a  thing  for  which  he 
should  be  privately  congratulated.  Christian- 
ity has  no  economy  of  certificated  virtues;  it 
does  not  deal  in  medals  and  diplomas.  It  sets 
up  no  model,  pattern,  paragon  or  celestial  fash- 
ion-plate. Its  ideal  goodness  is  ineffably  good 
because,  with  unfaltering  sweetness  and 
strength,  it  confounds  itself  incontinently  in 
the  bad. 

The  Church  will  regard  itself  as  constitution- 
ally coterminous  with  secular  society.  The 
point  is  not  that  the  Church  will  strive  to  reach 
the  very  low  and  bad  people — it  has  been  try- 
ing to  do  that  for  a  long  time  with  curious  and 
confused  results;  the  point  is  that  at  last  the 
dead -set  to  save  souls  will  be  abandoned;  and 
instead  of  keeping  up  the  haggard,  wear}- 
chase,  the  Church  will  simply  assume  both  the 
pursuers  and  the  pursued — regarding  them  all 
alike  as  equal  constituents  of  the  common- 
wealth of  souls. 

The  religion  of  democracy  takes  in  all  the 
people  without  exception,  not  because  it  is  in- 
different to  moral  and   spiritual  distinctions, 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

and  not  because  it  holds  that  men  are  naturally- 
good  or  even  that  everybod}^  is  sure  to  be  saved. 
It  is  not  because  it  makes  light  of  the  eternal 
and  tragic  issue  between  Jerusalem  and  Baby- 
lon, but  because  it  would  give  its  whole  soul  to 
that  issue,  that  it  has  written  upon  its  doorposts 
and  the  footpace  of  its  altar:  Judge  not. 
Unto  this  last  and  He  was  made  sin. 

And,  in  the  third  place,  the  Church  will 
abandon  the  attempt  to  truss  up  and  underpin 
the  Truth,  and  will,  on  the  contrary,  repose  in 
quiet  strength  upon  those  sills  and  girders  of 
the  universal  frame  which  have  been  or  here- 
after shall  be  discovered.  It  will  appear  that 
the  Truth  is  not  a  sacred  deposit  to  be  kept  in 
a  box  under  guard  of  priestly  seneschals,  but  a 
living,  tremendous  Thing— able  to  take  care  of 
Itself  as  well  as  of  all  who  will  trust  it.  Such 
is  obviously  the  case  with  the  truth  of  physics; 
so  it  is  also  with  the  truth  of  metaphysics. 

If  what  is  called  a  lie  will  wear  as  well  as 
the  truth  in  the  long  run,  it  cannot  be  a  lie. 
The  truth  at  last  must  be  proved  in  experience; 
there  is  after  all  no  other  credible  proof.  That 
an  unbroken  succession  of  mutes,  dervishes  and 
fakirs— or  of  prebendaries,  deans  and  curates- 
have  sworn  to  a  thing  for  a  thousand  years  m 

no  proof. 

X65 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

It  is  time  to  take  off  the  handicap  from  her- 
esy, and  to  absolve  the  shackled  clergy  from 
their  vows.  Time  was  when  the  idea  of  the 
Church  as  the  prop  and  pillar  of  the  truth  was 
credible  enough— perhaps  indispensable  to  the 
gestation  of  the  modern  world.  Given  the  pro- 
found philosophical  and  practical  skepticism  of 
ancient  society,  it  was  perhaps  impossible  for 
the  truth  of  a  spiritual  democracy  to  get  credit 
otherwise  than  as  a  miracle  of  special  revela- 
tion, imposed  and  guaranteed  from  without,  and 
neither  to  be  proved  nor  disproved  by  ordinary 
experience.  But  the  rising  spirit  of  Christian- 
ity, coming  to  clear  utterance  in  the  Renais- 
sance and  the  Reformation,  and  to  general  ac- 
ceptance in  the  subsequent  times,  has  reduced 
that  conception  of  the  Church  to  hopeless  ana- 
chronism. It  is  the  faith  of  the  modern  world 
that  the  common  mind,  standing  over  against 
the  common  universe,  can  in  hunger  and  thirst 
after  reasonableness  understand  somewhat  of 
reality.  And  it  is  coming  to  be  perceived 
by  the  people  that,  as  a  corps  of  physicians 
sworn  to  a  particular  scheme  of  therapeutics, 
would  stand  convicted  of  moral  and  intellectual 
levity  and  would  be  disqualified  for  the  prac- 
tice of  their  profession,  so  the  sworn  preachers 
of  the  churches  are  disqualified  to  preach. 

150 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

The  preachers  seem  to  be  retained  in  a  spe- 
cial interest  and  mortgaged  to  the  platitudes. 
The  people  long  for  the  disengaged  accents  of 
an  unmufBed  man.  It  is  necessary  to  freely 
differ  from  the  Apostles  in  order  to  recommend 
the  things  they  stood  for.  And  if  the  people 
do  not  believe  that  a  God  may  be  the  son  of 
man  or  a  man  the  son  of  God,  it  is  largely  be- 
cause they  have  been  told  so  only  by  people  who 
seemed  to  be  obliged  to  say  so. 

Most  of  the  clergy  are  in  a  difficult  case,  for 
they  really  do  believe  all  the  inspiring  things 
that  they  have  promised  to  believe;  they  must 
therefore  continue  to  lie  under  the  imputation 
that  they  say  what  is  proper  to  say.  But  for 
the  rest  the  remedy  is  easy — it  had  been  good 
for  Herod  to  break  his  vow  and  save  the  life  cf 
a  prophet. 

The  attempt  to  unify  the  churches  by  soft 
diplomacies  and  compromises,  the  search  for  a 
minimum  creed  to  meet  the  requirements  of  the 
most  attenuated  mind,  the  letting  go  of  the 
facts  by  which  the  people  must  live  or  die,  for 
the  sake  of  sociability — all  this  is  one  of  the 
pitifulest  spectacles  that  these  times  present. 

Dire  obstacles  to  the  new  Catholicism  are 
those  amiable  clergymen  who  would  trade  off 
the  law  of  gravitation  for  the  sake  of  getting 

157 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

everybody  to  agree.  Catholicism  cannot  be  got 
out  of  compromise.  And  the  new  Catholicism 
is  simply  thoroughgoing  Protestantism  with 
all  the  loyalty  to  truth  and  the  devotion  to 
great  ideas  for  which  that  word  historically 
stands. 

The  Protestant  Catholic  Church  shall  be  the 
spring  and  energy  of  science  and  art  and  of  all 
education.  The  University  shall  at  last  arise. 
Sown  in  the  days  of  Alcuin  and  Abelard,  the 
chivalry  of  science  and  art  shall  come  to  its 
flower.  The  disclosure  of  the  free  and  demo- 
cratic constitution  of  the  great  mediaeval  uni- 
versities of  Oxford,  Paris  and  Bologna  comes 
as  a  surprise  to  those  whose  ideas  of  a  univer- 
sity have  been  formed  on  the  model  of  Harvard 
and  Yale,  and  the  like  prim  high  schools  and 
knowledge  shops  of  modern  Europe.  But  the 
mediaeval  schools,  like  the  modern,  were  sti- 
fled in  Aristotle  and  doted  on  dead  things;  the 
University  is  in  the  future,  awaiting  the  rise  of 
a  democratic  Catholicism. 

The  soul  of  the  University  is  the  passion  for 
the  Eternal.  It  risks  its  life  continually  upon 
the  reality  of  the  ideal.  It  does  not  principally 
exist  to  teach — everj^thing  else  in  the  world 
exists  to  teach;  the  University  exists  to  discover 
and  to  create.     It  seizes  upon  the  eternal  ele- 

158 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

meets  of  things  and  transmutes  them  into  art 
and  history.  It  summons  the  youth  and  faith 
of  the  nations  to  the  infinite  and  arduous  labor 
of  the  Revolution.  It  requires  of  its  children 
the  most  perfect  purity  and  self-denial.  For 
no  one  whose  soul  is  knotted  with  lust  or  fear, 
no  prurient  glory-seeker,  no  trap-setter  to  catch 
distinction,  no  one  afraid  to  die  in  his  working 
clothes  as  a  common  man,  can  be  an  artist,  a 
man  of  science  and  a  civilizer. 

jy.— The  name  of  ihe  hour  is  Opportunity. 
The  real  office  of  prophets  is  to  see  that  the 
thing  come  true.  The  hearts  of  the  people  ev- 
erywhere are  aglow  with  expectation  for  the 
coming  of  justice  and  beauty  upon  the  earth; 
but  what  of  that?  It  is  not  by  expectation  that 
the  Idea  becomes  a  Fact— this  miracle  is 
wrought  by  faith.  It  is  by  faith  that  a  man 
gives  body  to  a  shadow,  and  existence  to  that 
which  otherwise  would  not  have  been. 

It  is  not  yet  settled  what  kind  of  a  century  this 
new  era  shall  be— God,  I  think,  has  not  decided, 
and  will  not  decide.  It  is  not  decided  whether 
the  City  of  the  Soul  shall  rise  now,  or  after  a 
while.  God  was  always  ready  and  waiting. 
He  has  waited  a  long  time. 

There  is  no  Destiny— there  is  only  Opporta- 

159 


The  Religion  of  Democracy. 

liity  and  an  infinite  waiting  for  the  coming 
of  the  poets  and  the  artists  who  shall  rejoice  in 
Life  on  any  terms,  hearing  the  singing  in  the 
heart  of  God  and  sending  hack  a  brave  antiph- 
onal  across  all  the  deserts  and  wildernesses  of 
the  world. 


THE  END, 


1.'  / 


^ITY      ; 


160 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


^S.       THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 

STAMPED  BELOW 


MAR  27,1915, 


/UG  18  191S 


NOV  19  1915 


SEP  2  5 1973 


-  *. 


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SENfT  ON  ILL 


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